ORAL ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS

JUSTICE

The Secretary of State was asked—

Community Legal Advice Centre and Network

Bob Neill: When he next expects to meet the Legal Services Commission to discuss the roll-out of the community legal advice centre and network programme.

Bridget Prentice: Lord Bach, the Minister with responsibility for legal aid, regularly meets the Legal Services Commission to discuss a range of issues relating to the legal aid reform programme, including the development of the community legal service.

Bob Neill: I am grateful to the Minister for that reply. Will she ensure that those discussions take account of the need to ensure that the roll-out of the community legal service does not prejudice the funding and operations of Citizens Advice? I recently met the excellent manager of our citizens advice bureau in Bromley, Angela Bragg. It provides a first-rate service, but there is a real fear that unless the creation of the community legal service is properly handled, it could cream off much of the funding and make some CABs no longer viable. That would be a serious loss to the communities they serve.

Bridget Prentice: I endorse what the hon. Gentleman says about the role of citizens advice bureaux, not only in Bromley but throughout the country. They do an excellent job, and it is important that they continue to do so. I can assure him that in the roll-out of community legal advice centres, which will offer integrated services on debt, housing, welfare and so on, the Legal Services Commission will invite tenders for its funds and citizens advice bureaux may well be part of that process. They have certainly been part of the process up to now, and I hope that they continue to be so.

Alun Michael: Does my hon. Friend accept that there is still general concern that the Legal Services Commission does not understand the nature of the third sector and the added value that is provided by organisations such as citizens advice bureaux? They not only deal with the legal issues, but look more widely at the problems that led somebody to get into legal difficulties. They also address the need for counselling and financial advice. Frankly, the tendering of services within Government sometimes misses the point in relation to that added value.

Bridget Prentice: I agree to some extent with my right hon. Friend in that those who seek legal advice often have multiple and related problems. Citizens advice bureaux and other not-for-profit organisations are often best placed to put all those together and give more rounded advice. When the legal advice centres are rolled out, the not-for-profit organisations will be part of the process, so that the recommendations about the shape of the future of the service will be in their hands. They will therefore be an integral part of the future of legal advice.

Henry Bellingham: Further to the concerns expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), is the Minister aware that Leicester law centre has already closed and that one county council has stated that all its CABs are now under threat? Does she agree that the community legal advice centres and the community legal advice networks are untried and untested? What happened to the pilot scheme that was promised, and will she now consider urgently the harm that could be done to our vulnerable constituents if CABs have to close? Is not this yet another example of this Government trusting a bureaucratic, public sector solution, rather than a voluntary sector group such as the CABs?

Bridget Prentice: The hon. Gentleman has missed the point. Law centres are funded not so much by the LSC, but by other sources of funding. Therefore, it is not within the LSC's gift to decide whether they remain open. Of course it is unfortunate if a law centre makes the decision to close. However, the majority of providers are adapting well to the new system, including the not-for-profit sector. The LSC is not the only funder of advice agencies, and any withdrawal of an advice agency may be rooted elsewhere. Citizens Advice has worked closely with us throughout the legal aid reform programme, and I hope that it will continue to do so.

Julie Morgan: Is my hon. Friend aware of the concern felt by small voluntary organisations in south Wales, in particular about the community legal advice network that is proposed to cover the Cardiff, Vale and Bridgend areas? Many of the small providers fear that they will not be able to compete, and they provide services for extremely vulnerable clients.

Bridget Prentice: I am not aware of the particular difficulties in south Wales that my hon. Friend mentions, but I will ensure that Lord Bach is made aware of them. If there are particular problems, he and the LSC will look at ensuring that the people of south Wales have access to proper advice agencies.

Prisoners

Angela Watkinson: What recent discussions he has had with HM Prison Service on increasing the amount of purposeful activity undertaken by inmates in prisons.

David Evennett: What recent discussions he has had with HM Prison Service on increasing the amount of purposeful activity in prisons.

David Hanson: The Government and the National Offender Management Service are committed to increasing the amount and quality of purposeful activity in prisons including, for example, the expansion and further development of links with private sector employers to increase the range of constructive work and training available to prisoners; the delivery of a comprehensive range of interventions designed to address offending behaviour; and an improvement in the quality of prison education provision.

Angela Watkinson: The Minister will agree that a custodial sentence provides the opportunity for training and education to prepare people to lead productive lives, but that what often happens in practice is that people are moved from prison to prison, meaning that they have different tutors and their courses are left unfinished. What will he do to remedy that? Will he have discussions with his colleagues in the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and in the Department for Work and Pensions to see what additional work opportunities can be given to prisoners when they leave, so that they are motivated to learn while they are in prison?

David Hanson: The hon. Lady makes a valid point. It is important that we have employment opportunities and that we link them to what happens in the world outside for when prisoners leave. Last year alone, more than 40,000 prisoners went into training and employment at the end of their sentence. I take the point that occasionally movement between prisons can disrupt sentences. We have to focus on providing meaningful employment, raising skills and matching that with the business world outside. Indeed, later this year I shall host a further seminar with some key employers to try to make links with prisons in the community.

David Evennett: In June, the Government introduced the core day, which means that in 159 of our state prisons prisoners are locked in their cells for the whole of Friday, with the cancellation of classes and workshops. Does the Minister think that that will help in the fight against recidivism?

David Hanson: I know that the hon. Gentleman meant Friday afternoon, rather than the whole of Friday. Prisoners are not locked up for the whole of Friday. We are looking at a range of efficiency measures. The core day is at an early stage in its implementation. I need to look at that, and we have a group looking at the impact of the core day on a range of services. Overall, last year, some 25.3 hours per prisoner was, on average, spent on purposeful activity. I want to see that figure increase and, for the reasons I gave to the hon. Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson), I am trying to ensure that that happens.

Dennis Skinner: Will the system that my right hon. Friend is outlining be comprehensive enough to find something useful for Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross to do in the event that they finish up inside?

David Hanson: I am sure that we have some in-house entertainment that they can do. My hon. Friend makes a serious point. It is not for me to comment on the issues that were mentioned, but I feel that both Mr. Ross and Mr. Brand have to apologise for the broadcast. I do not think that it was appropriate or in keeping with broadcasting. I am not sure that it will result in prosecutions, but I feel that an apology is called for.

Kerry McCarthy: I am sure that the Minister will agree that given the reoffending rates among young offenders it is particularly important that they find purposeful activities during their periods inside. Is he aware of the scheme that has been operating between Ashfield young offenders institution and Avon fire and rescue, whereby the youngsters do the equivalent of a firefighter's training course? Does he think that that model could be adapted elsewhere?

David Hanson: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that point. I am aware of the scheme. It is important that we give people pride in themselves, as well as some recognition of their achievement, and that we let them learn new skills. The fire service scheme, linked with the young offenders institution in this case, offers all those activities. It is key to us that we raise the level of skills and of employability and that we give people some pride and self-worth, which, sadly, they often have not had outside the estate.

John Bercow: Given that the right hon. Gentleman is a notable progressive, and pursuant to the publication of the youth crime action plan, will he accept that it should be a priority to do something to help the 60 per cent.-plus of the 11,000 people in the young offenders estate who suffer from speech, language and communication problems on a scale and of a severity that prevents them from accessing conventional education and training courses?

David Hanson: Absolutely. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his recognition of my progressive nature, which I am sure the House will welcome. I recognise that he has done a considerable amount of work on the question of dyslexia and other learning disabilities. There is, sadly, a high correlation between the people who go into offending behaviour and their level of literacy and numeracy. We need to address the problem early. The youth crime action plan, with which I have been dealing along with my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, is trying to look at early intervention and at how to make better use of people's time in custody to deal with those very issues.

David Taylor: There is a rather Dickensian feel to the list of activities that prisoners undertake: scrubbing floors, cleaning toilets and stitching laundry are jobs that Magwitch would recognise, but does my right hon. Friend have great expectations that a wider variety of tasks will be available in the years ahead that will genuinely fit discharged prisoners better for the outside world that will receive them?

David Hanson: There is certainly some low-level employment in prisons, but I can give some different examples. I visited Wandsworth prison recently and saw the high investment that has been made in giving some prisoners computer skills so that they have the potential to work in the sector. Other prisons offer real and definite skills in housebuilding, decorating and painting, which require a high national vocational qualification. Indeed, funding for education in prisons has risen in the past six years alone from £57 million in 2001 to £170 million in 2008. That is real progress, and we are looking to match giving inmates skills for the outside world with what needs to be done in prison.

William McCrea: I accept that purposeful activity for inmates is vital, but will the Minister assure the House that the justice system is there to punish those who have broken the law?

David Hanson: Absolutely. Yesterday, my right hon. Friend the Justice Secretary repeated what all Ministers have always made very clear—that the justice system is about punishment and reform. There has to be an element of punishment, as that is what the public and victims quite rightly demand, but equally we need to make sure that those who come into contact with our system do not return to us after the end of their sentence. The key to that is employability, as well as raised skill levels and the maintenance of family links. We must also build support for accommodation outside prison and try to deal with some of the real and meaningful problems to do with drugs, alcohol and mental health. Our pathways programme tries to do all that in a positive way.

Fiona Mactaggart: The Minister said that the important thing about purposeful educational activity in prison is that it prepares people for the world outside, and I welcome that. For example, great progress has been made in helping prisoners to learn to read, but the problem of giving prisoners—those doing National Extension College courses, and others—access to the internet is a real barrier to preparing them for the world outside. Has there been any progress in making it easier for prisoners to use the internet safely?

David Hanson: First, may I pay tribute to the work that my hon. Friend did in this field when she held ministerial office? She rightly recognises that we need to raise prisoners' internet and computing skills in preparation for the outside world, and we are looking at how we can make that practicable in a secure way. However, she will accept that that there are real difficulties with internet usage and contact between prisoners and the outside world, so security concerns remain paramount in our approach to the issue.

Edward Garnier: In July, the Government severely cut the amount of time that prisoners can spend working or learning to read and write, but even before that prisoners spent only three and a half hours a day, Monday to Friday, on purposeful activity. Does the Minister share my disappointment that, while the reoffending rate for ex-prisoners rockets and thus more victims of crime are created, the Secretary of State resorts to cheap soundbites about sentencing to disguise the Government's incompetence in failing to provide real opportunities for offenders to turn away from crime through purposeful activity in prison?

David Hanson: First, let me tell the hon. and learned Gentleman that crime overall is down some 39 per cent. since 1997. Reoffending figures have also fallen over the past six years, as he will see if he looks at the announcement that I made to the House in September. He mentioned the figures on purposeful activity by prisoners, which I set out earlier to the hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Mr. Evennett). Currently, in 2007-08, each prisoner spends some 25.3 hours per week on purposeful activity. That is a steady figure, but I am working to increase it and I know that I will have his support in doing so—although unfortunately a future Conservative Government, if there were to be one, would be unlikely to provide the necessary resources.

Fixed-term Parliaments

Jo Swinson: What recent representations he has received on the proposal for fixed-term Parliaments.

Michael Wills: The issue of fixed-term Parliaments has been debated in this House on a number of occasions. Most recently, the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) introduced a private Member's Bill that would have provided for general elections every four years.

Jo Swinson: Many excellent arguments are commonly used in favour of fixed-term Parliaments, but does the Minister agree that another advantage of such a system is that it would make it much easier to regulate party political spending over the entire electoral cycle? Surely that is particularly desirable, as there is clearly a need for much tighter control of party funding and spending.

Michael Wills: On the hon. Lady's final point, she will be aware that we are bringing a Bill before the House that will address all those issues, and I look forward to her contribution to debates on it as we tackle what I agree is a very important issue. On the other issue that she raised, there are arguments on both sides. They have been exhaustively rehearsed, and no doubt we will continue debating them for the foreseeable future.

Tony Wright: When I introduced a Bill on the subject many years ago, I was told that I had to get royal permission, which surely reminds us that, at some point, we need to get serious hold of prerogative powers. Does not the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) have a good essential point, which is that if we really want to control or get hold of the vexed issue of party funding, we have to get some more reliable control over the election spending period? Fixed-term Parliaments would enable us to do that.

Michael Wills: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his contribution. He will be aware, of course, that we are coming to terms with how we get a grip on the prerogative power; that is the basis of the "Governance of Britain" programme. We are introducing a Constitutional Renewal Bill, as he is well aware. We have built on the excellent work done by his Committee—the Public Administration Committee—to try to codify the royal prerogative. We will take that work further forward. Of course he is right that we have to get a grip on party spending at election time; that is precisely why we are introducing the Bill. Again, I look forward to his contribution to debate on the Bill. I point out to him, and to the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson), who first asked the question, that there are arguments against fixed-term Parliaments. As they will both be well aware, there is an element of inflexibility in such a system that sometimes would not serve this country well.

Douglas Hogg: May I say to Ministers that the present system gives far too much influence and control to the Prime Minister of the day? Those of us who want much greater parliamentary democracy and curbs on the Executive would like fixed-term Parliaments.

Michael Wills: I agree with part of what the right hon. and learned Gentleman said, and the Prime Minister has already said that he wants the dissolution of Parliament to be subject to a vote in this House for precisely the reasons that the right hon. and learned Gentleman gave. There is a misunderstanding that fixed-term Parliaments would somehow remove the Executive's ability to hold an election at a time of their choosing. That is not necessarily the case. For example, the former West Germany had fixed-term Parliaments, but in 1972 and 1983 the Government of the day were able to engineer a general election by engineering a vote of no confidence in the Government, so what the right hon. and learned Gentleman is looking for would not necessarily transpire.

Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority

Shailesh Vara: What assessment he has made of the performance of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority.

Maria Eagle: Performance is monitored and managed on a monthly basis by my Department and by me. Assessment to date shows that the size of the CICA's live case load has reduced and is the smallest that it has been in 20 years. Its unit cost per case has reduced, the time for registering an application has reduced, and the time that it takes to reach a first decision has reduced.

Shailesh Vara: I thank the Minister for those comments. Does she believe that the new criminal injuries compensation scheme properly addresses the discrepancies between the compensation awarded by the CICA and awards made by the civil courts?

Maria Eagle: The CICA scheme and its predecessor were never meant to ape the civil courts in every respect. The scheme is meant to enable victims of crime who cannot use the civil court to get some consideration from society of the fact that they have been victimised. It is not meant to be a parallel scheme that pays out the same as a civil court would.

Simon Hughes: The CICA does a good, important job. Will the Minister look into a problem that delays cases, meaning that it is often years between an application being made and a decision being reached? It often results from poor or slow co-ordination between the authority, the police and other agencies. I can send her details of cases that have gone on years too long and have not been resolved.

Maria Eagle: Yes. I am happy to look at any cases that the hon. Gentleman wishes to send to me, which have come to his attention as a local Member of Parliament. Many Members will have come across such cases, and some of the issues that he identifies were raised by the National Audit Office in its report on the performance of the CICA. Its recommendations were accepted and we are implementing them to improve the aspects that the hon. Gentleman identified. Hon. Members will see that the performance of the CICA is improving as we go forward because we are focusing on those very issues. That said, there will be always be problems getting the right medical evidence and the right prognosis, and making sure that offers are properly made and accepted and that future loss of earnings is properly calculated. These things can never be done instantly, but I hope the hon. Gentleman and other Members will see the performance of the CICA steadily improve.

Ian Taylor: Does the Minister understand my concerns that the welcome increase in compensation for military injury in the battlefield has not been reflected in the civilian damages paid to people who are affected by terrorism? I have a constituent who was injured in the July 2005 bombings—she suffered more than 22 serious injuries. I do not accept that the tariff in the new scheme will properly reflect that, particularly when the assessment of that constituent was performed about three months after the injuries were incurred. The problems that she faces are increasing and will probably get worse during the years she lives. She is in her 20s.

Maria Eagle: Indeed, I accept the point that the hon. Gentleman makes—that a tariff-based scheme such as the CICA scheme will never be able to reflect as fully as a full civil litigation case could the true extent of injuries into the future. The CICA scheme is not intended to do that; it is meant to provide a measure of compensation for those who were the victims of, in this case, terrorism. The hon. Gentleman's constituent will, I hope, have benefited from the ex gratia payments from the charitable arrangements that were made. I hope that those will help her. It is important to realise that a tariff-based scheme that is meant to provide a measure of compensation to the victims of crime can never be expected fully to compensate, in the way that civil litigation could, for the full injuries that some people unfortunately incur.

Brian Binley: I recognised in the Minister's opening response the word "reduced" on a number of occasions, but I did not hear any meaningful figures. Will she therefore update the House on the number of cases in the authority's backlog? In recognition of the fact that in 2007-08 the proportion of cases decided was only 64 per cent., will she tell us whether she thinks that is good enough? Will she improve on that this year?

Maria Eagle: I could bore the House for some time with a list of figures. I will tell the hon. Gentleman, subject to your indulgence, Mr. Speaker, that the case load has reduced over the past year from 83,986 cases to 73,813 cases; that the time taken to reach a decision over that period has reduced from 14 months to 12 months, with a target of 10 months looming on the horizon; that the time to register cases has reduced from a baseline last year of 15 days to 8.3 days, with a target of three days; that the unit cost of each case has reduced from £400 last year to £359; that the target for resolving cases for next year—

Mr. Speaker: Order. I would say that the Minister should place a letter in the Library.

David Burrowes: Why did the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Lewisham, East (Bridget Prentice) tell the "Today" programme on 13 August:
	"A victim of rape should not have any compensation reduced because of their drinking"
	alcohol, yet a month before, the Minister introduced in Parliament a new compensation scheme that becomes effective next week, which the CICA confirmed does not exempt drunk rape victims from having their awards reduced? When will Ministers realise that what drives victims nuts, to use the Justice Secretary's phrase, is 11 years of posturing about victims of crime but not delivering real justice?

Maria Eagle: As I recall, when the slight changes to the scheme that come into force next week were debated in Committee, no party, including the hon. Gentleman's, objected to them or voted against them. May I make it clear that what the Under-Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, East (Bridget Prentice) said in respect of that case is the current policy and always has been the policy. Those people who wrongly had their compensation reduced because they were supposed to have been drinking alcohol have had ex gratia payments, to the extent that we have discovered who they are, and any others who feel that they have had their compensation reduced on that basis will, if they come forward, get an ex gratia payment to make good that reduction.

Legal Services Act

David Kidney: What progress he has made in implementing the Legal Services Act 2007, with particular reference to its provision for alternative business structures.

Bridget Prentice: I am pleased to say that implementation of the Legal Services Act 2007 is progressing according to the planned timetable. Implementation of alternative business structures will be possible after the Legal Services Board is fully operational, and that is expected in 2010. However, I intend to commence provisions that will enable legal disciplinary practices as soon as the regulators have made the necessary changes to their rules.

David Kidney: Does the Minister agree that the changes that we are making are as significant for the provision of legal services in the future as the deregulation of the City was in the 1980s for the provision of financial services today? Can she assure the House that, this time, the regulation of those who are let loose to deliver financial services will be effective and meaningful and that, if she devises the scheme, she will consult the House so that her provision for that regulation can be scrutinised?

Bridget Prentice: I agree with my hon. Friend on all points. The 2007 Act is intended to put the consumer at the heart of the legal system. It will also encourage more effective competition, innovation and transparency and safeguard the independence of the legal profession. However, as he rightly says, the regulation must be proportionate and I assure him that the House will be party to ensuring that it is done properly.

Jeremy Wright: Does the Minister agree that along with the undoubted advantages of alternative business structures comes the risk that the public will perceive that they are not receiving advice as independent as the advice that they previously received from a separate set of professionals? Will she make sure that when the structures are implemented, particular attention is paid to the independence of each of those professionals under one roof, to make sure that the public not only get independent advice, but perceive that they do?

Bridget Prentice: I assure the hon. Gentleman that that will be the case. During debates on the Legal Services Bill in this House and the other place, we made it clear that the independence of legal advice was paramount. We have set up the structures so that the legal heads and financial heads are all independently agreed and there is no outside influence on the advice given to the consumer. For me, the most important part of the 2007 Act is that the consumer is, for the first time, to be put at the heart of the system.

Electoral Administration Act

Paddy Tipping: When he plans to bring into force section 59 of the Electoral Administration Act 2006; and if he will make a statement.

Michael Wills: As my hon. Friend will be aware, section 59 of the Electoral Administration Act 2006 cannot be brought into force until the Electoral Commission informs my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Justice that it is satisfied that it will receive the information that it needs from the House authorities. Discussions between the House authorities and the Electoral Commission have been ongoing for some time and are continuing, although I expect them to conclude soon.

Paddy Tipping: Is the Minister aware that a system of dual reporting to the Registrar of Members' Interests and the Electoral Commission causes concern and confusion across the House? Is it not important to have a one-stop shop? If we do not implement section 59, the Political Parties and Elections Bill, currently before the House, provides other opportunities. Will the Minister take the opportunity and act?

Michael Wills: I take this opportunity to thank my hon. Friend, the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young), who is in his seat, and all their colleagues on the Standards and Privileges Committee for all the hard work that they have done to bring this matter to a resolution. Of course we understand how important the issue is to all Members of the House. We are not far off resolving the issue, and I hope that the solution that emerges will meet the House's approval.

Andrew MacKay: As we all agree, the dual declaration is wrong. It causes confusion, and innocent mistakes are often unreasonably punished. Is it not about time that the Secretary of State pushed the Electoral Commission, which we know has been dragging its feet? This situation has gone on for months and is totally unacceptable. The Electoral Commission needs to move—and move fast.

Michael Wills: I agree with the right hon. Gentleman. The time has come to act. This has been going on for too long, and we are determined, as far as we can, to bring it to a conclusion. We think that we are very close to that, and we hope that the solution will emerge soon.

Electoral Systems

Charles Kennedy: What progress has been made in his Department's review of electoral systems; and if he will make a statement.

Jack Straw: The Government's review of voting systems was published in January this year. It considers the experience of the voting systems introduced in the United Kingdom since 1997, and much comparative data from around the world. The review forms an important part of the continuing debate on electoral reform—on which, of course, I have a very open mind.

Charles Kennedy: I think that we all knew about that latter point. It is nice to hear that the Justice Secretary can get a word in edgeways, given the plethora of Ministers that he has assembled around him. He will undoubtedly go down in history as one of the great electoral reformers of recent years, with the number of systems that he has introduced at different levels in different places. When he published the Government's review of electoral systems, to which he referred, he said that it was to "inform the current debate". If so, why is there is no specific mention of electoral reform in the White Paper, in the Government's draft constitutional reform Bill, or in the next steps of governance process? Is not that a bit of an oversight in terms of informing the debate? Why not extend the joyous Scottish experience of the single transferable vote for local government south of the border?

Jack Straw: The right hon. Gentleman and I probably have slightly different views.  [ Interruption . ] I may have an entirely open mind, but I have reached a settled conclusion on the system of electing coalitions of the kind that they have in Austria, which led to deadlock and a failure of the electors to express their opinions, in Israel, which leads to continual and repeated elections, in New Zealand, where the introduction of proportional representation led to a decline in turnout, and in Norway, where proportional representation is blamed for causing political disengagement by preventing voters from being able to turf out Governments. So far, therefore, I have not been convinced. As for Scotland, it is of course true that the party of which I am honoured to be a member has introduced in manifestos, and therefore in legislation, some forms of proportionality in elections—not to this place but to other assemblies. I note that one commentator, Mr. Simon Jenkins, pointed out in  The Guardian last year:
	"The Lib Dems are proving that they cannot work a system to which they have hitched their wagon for half a century."
	He concluded:
	"It is surely time for the Lib Dems to fold their tent and go."

Gisela Stuart: Whatever the merits of proportional representation, will my right hon. Friend, in his review of electoral systems, take another look at the system that was employed in the European elections, and probably conclude that a closed list system is just about the worst of all possibilities?

Jack Straw: My hon. Friend will remember that the closed list system was a manifesto commitment in 1997, and it was my duty, simply as a servant of the party, to put it before this House without expressing any personal opinion about its merits or otherwise. She may have noticed, however, that in the proposals in the very good all-party White Paper on the reform of the House of Lords—I have to say, for the avoidance of doubt, that this was not a proposal with which the Opposition were associated—we ruled out, whatever other system was proposed, a closed list system. My hon. Friend, and indeed the House, may wish to give a wider audience to that conclusion.

Nicholas Winterton: Does the Justice Secretary agree that any form of proportional representation will lead to no Government or to bad Government—and furthermore, that any list system will ensure that this place is stuffed full of supine party individuals, here only to do what their party tells them, that that will do this House no good, and that people will have less and less interest in politics and in how this House operates?

Jack Straw: I agree with the hon. Gentleman in every particular. Alongside his serious points, let me make a serious point.

John Bercow: He's not a supine individual.

Jack Straw: And neither is the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow), and neither are most of my hon. Friends— [ Laughter. ] And just so that we are clear, some say that I am not, either.
	I understand the sedulous attractions of proportional representation, although I profoundly disagree with them. The point that those who support PR have never been able to explain is that there can be no proportional transfer of votes into power. A criticism made of first past the post is that it often gives power to a minority, but it usually gives power to the largest minority, whereas the overwhelming difficulty with proportional representation is that it gives power to the smallest minority.

Mr. Speaker: I call Jim Devine.

David Winnick: Does my right hon. Friend believe—

Mr. Speaker: Order. I called Mr. Devine.

Jim Devine: I was bowing to age, there, Mr. Speaker. May I assure my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Justice that many of us in our party in Scotland do not support STV? It is causing major problems with constituents. They do not know who their councillor is. Other constituents are playing councillors off against other councillors, and there is a detrimental effect on councillors' health. Instead of going to one community council meeting, they have to go to three or four, multiplied over a month.

Jack Straw: I take full note of what my hon. Friend has said, and I will record that as a balanced contribution to the consideration of what we shall do in future.

John Mason: Does the Minister agree that the most popular Government in the UK at the moment are the Scottish Government? They happen to be a minority Government and they have the advantage that they cannot force through any measures on their own, but need other parties to join with them. That tends to give a majority view to issues that are carried forward—and STV at council level means that people have the choice to bypass sleepy traditional councillors.

Jack Straw: I also note that the alleged attractions of the Scottish Executive are rather diminishing as reality presses in on them, and the claim that Scotland would form an arc of prosperity—along with those other paradigms of prosperity, Ireland and Iceland—now looks slightly tatty.

Employment Tribunals

Tony Lloyd: What assessment he has made of the capacity of employment tribunals to discharge their functions in a timely fashion.

Bridget Prentice: The performance of employment tribunals is discussed monthly by the tribunal service executive team and quarterly by a special steering board. Officials also regularly meet statisticians from the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform to produce robust forecasts, and to inform resource and sitting day requirements. The tribunals aim to bring 75 per cent. of individual claims to full hearing within 26 weeks of the claims being accepted, and to issue 85 per cent. of judgments within four weeks of the date that cases are concluded. In 2007-08 the former target was missed by 1 per cent. and the latter exceeded by 2 per cent.

Tony Lloyd: Is my hon. Friend aware of the massive increase in the number of cases before tribunals concerning equal pay? Although they quite rightly need to be resolved, they take a long time because of the complexity, and the increase in numbers has been phenomenal. It is possible that half the cases before tribunals this year will involve equal pay. Can she assure the House that we will not get into a position whereby people whose cases do not involve equal pay will find themselves crowded out from the justice that they expect from the tribunal system?

Bridget Prentice: My hon. Friend makes an important point. Equal pay claims have existed for more than four years, and so far we have been able to cope with the case load. Sometimes, however, they can be complicated and take quite a long time to settle. We are aware of the concerns that my hon. Friend raises about the growth in equal pay claims, and the impact that they can have on tribunals' ability to manage their case loads and to hear other important and pressing cases. As a result, we have set up two specialist units, in Newcastle and Scotland, to deal with such claims. I assure my hon. Friend that I will monitor the situation closely to ensure that other cases that equally deserve a hearing will be heard.

End of Custody Licence Scheme

James Gray: What recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the operation of the end of custody licence scheme.

Jack Straw: The end of custody licence scheme was necessary when it was introduced, but, as I made clear to the House, I intend to phase it out as soon as there is sufficient prison capacity to do so. So far this year, about 2,500 additional places have been provided ahead of target.

James Gray: Since the scheme was introduced, some 34,000 prisoners have been released early: 6,500 were violent and 650 have reoffended. When does the Secretary of State believe that he can end the scheme? It will not even be reviewed until the end of next year, by which time it is estimated that some 70,000 prisoners—many of them violent—will have been released on to our streets.

Jack Straw: It is important to recall that we are considering release in the last 18 days—two and a half weeks—of a sentence. It is important to put that in perspective. There are a great many exclusions from the scheme, including serious violent and sexual offenders. It is not the case that we will review the scheme only at the end of next year. I keep it constantly under review and I understand the House's concern, which I share—18 days is still 18 days. I do not dispute the public concern about the scheme, which we keep constantly under review. As soon as I judge that there is sufficient capacity in the system, I will phase it out.

Nick Herbert: In a written answer published late last night, the Government reveal that three alleged murders were committed by prisoners while released early under the end of custody licence scheme. How can the Secretary of State have the front to talk about punishing offenders and being on the side of victims when his policy—under which more than 36,000 prisoners, including 7,000 violent criminals, have been released early—so clearly puts the public at risk?

Jack Straw: Of course, I understand the concern. I gave the figures to the hon. Gentleman, and I was concerned to ensure that he got them and that they were comprehensive. There are three cases, out of the thousands of prisoners who have been released early, in which allegations of murder have been made. In one case the proceedings are continuing, and I cannot comment on it. In the second case, the alleged perpetrator subsequently killed himself. When the third case came before the court last December, Mrs. Justice Swift stated in her sentencing remarks:
	"The fact that you were released early cannot, in my view, be said to have been causative of what happened thereafter"—
	that is, the murder. She continued:
	"It is highly likely that the events that took place would have occurred whenever you were released."

Nick Herbert: I find that answer astonishingly complacent. It appears that three additional murders may have been committed by offenders who were released 18 days early. We already know that one prisoner who was released early was convicted of a murder when he should have been safely behind bars. Last night the Ministry of Justice claimed that the scheme was working well. What is working well about a scheme that releases early offenders who go on to commit such serious crimes? The Ministry said that it would scrap early release when it was safe to do so. Is it not obvious to everyone, except the Government, that the policy is unsafe now, and should be scrapped immediately?

Jack Straw: I have given the answer about the three murder allegations. I simply repeat to the hon. Gentleman that the remarks about whether that particular terrible event would have taken place in any event were made not by me but by the honourable Mrs. Justice Swift, and she was very clear about it—sufficiently clear to put it on record in the sentencing remarks. In a circumstance in which I regret the scheme, I emphasise that the reoffending rate is 1 per cent., which is low, and that breaches are tackled quickly.
	Since the hon. Gentleman takes the matter to a party political level, let me say that he got surprisingly little coverage for a speech that he made to the Prison Governors Association on 8 October. It requires a wider audience, because he claimed:
	"we are the only major political party that is now talking about reducing the prison population".
	If that is the Opposition's policy, they will have serious difficulties in cutting out end of custody licence release.

Topical Questions

Mark Hunter: If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

Jack Straw: I would like to report to the House that we have made considerable progress in protecting the public by reducing reoffending in both adults and juveniles. The latest figures show that between 2000 and 2006 adult reoffending was down by 23 per cent., while juvenile reoffending was down by 19 per cent., although we of course accept that we have a great deal more work to do.

Mark Hunter: Members will remember that the introduction of a British day was a key recommendation of Lord Goldsmith's much heralded citizenship review, principally in order to encourage members of the public to celebrate our national identity and to promote greater integration and tolerance. However, there seems to be some confusion, which I hope the Minister can clarify. Last week the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, the hon. Member for North Swindon (Mr. Wills) said in reply to a written question from the hon. Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell):
	"there are no plans to introduce a national day".—[ Official Report, 21 October 2008; Vol. 481, c. 243W.]
	Last night, according to the BBC—

Mr. Speaker: Order. Supplementaries should be brief, particularly in topical questions, as I have said before. So perhaps we could have a brief reply.

Michael Wills: I can reassure the hon. Gentleman that there is no confusion at all. We are considering all the Goldsmith review's recommendations and will bring our conclusions to the House in due course.

John Robertson: My right hon. Friend will be aware that the money that has been allocated to groups in Scotland through the Barnett formula, and in particular the money for the groups that need it most, has fallen into a black hole under the current Administration there. Is it not time we revisited the constitutional settlement, to ensure that the money that goes to Scotland through the Barnett formula gets to the vulnerable people who need it, and for whom it was intended in the first place?

Jack Straw: I understand my hon. Friend's deep concern for his constituents in need whose needs are not being met by the policies of the Scottish Executive. However, part of the settlement was for there to be a block grant, so that there is full accountability by those who are making the decisions on spending.

Jo Swinson: With repossessions going through the roof, surely we need strong protection enshrined in law on both sides of the border to ensure that repossession is only ever used as a last resort. Will the Minister confirm whether the recently announced changes to the repossession procedures are statutory, and say how they can be enforced?

Bridget Prentice: What I can say to the hon. Lady is this. The protocol will take effect from 19 November and will set out clear guidance from the judiciary on the steps that lenders are expected to take before bringing a claim in the courts, with a view to ensuring that repossession is a last resort. If a case reaches court, the lenders will be required to be able to tell the court precisely what they have done to comply with the protocol, which will apply to arrears on first and second-charge residential mortgages. The protocol does not alter the parties' existing rights and obligations. The judiciary have brought the protocol forward and we welcome that move, so that we can safeguard those who are particularly vulnerable during this economic crisis.

Mark Pritchard: On Christmas eve 2006, my constituent, Mr. David George, a serving police officer in the West Mercia police force, was brutally attacked and kicked unconscious, and needed hospital treatment. The offender was subsequently caught, prosecuted and sentenced to 14 months in prison. Does the Justice Secretary share my outrage and the outrage of my constituents Mr. and Mrs. George, who were informed only last week that the culprit had been released, having served only 12 weeks behind bars? Is this the Justice Secretary's new definition of punishment?

Jack Straw: My heart, and that of the whole House, goes out to the police officer who was injured, and to his family, colleagues and friends. The hon. Gentleman will appreciate that I cannot possibly make comments on individual sentencing decisions; no one in my position can. However, I can say without contradiction that everyone knows that the prison population has risen by a third in recent years, and that the sentences typically handed down by the courts are longer, particularly for those convicted of offences of violence.

Natascha Engel: What steps is my right hon. Friend taking to ensure that when an employment tribunal makes an award, the employer pays up?

Bridget Prentice: My hon. Friend makes an important point. There have been cases in which a tribunal has found in favour of a claimant, yet the employer has not been as willing as he or she ought to have been to pay them. Next year, under the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007, we will ensure that cases can be registered in the county court, so claimants will be able to get a speedier resolution to the issue. This is something that we are concerned about. When a claim goes to an employment tribunal and the tribunal upholds the claimant's position, it is quite unacceptable that the employer should then either delay or deny the claimant their rightful compensation.

Gary Streeter: Prison officers in my constituency report to me that incidents of assault on prison staff by prisoners at HMP Dartmoor have recently risen sharply, perhaps reflecting a wider concern in society about the rise of violent crime. What steps have the Government taken to analyse this increase in assaults on prison staff, and what will the Minister do to ensure that these hard-working public servants are carefully protected?

David Hanson: This is an important issue. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I are committed to ensuring that violence in prisons is not tolerated in any form. Since 2004, every public sector prison has had in place a local violence strategy, and we have just jointly committed, with the Prison Officers Association, to a policy of zero tolerance of assaults on staff. I have a number of statistics that I will happily give to the hon. Gentleman following this Question Time, which show that overall, although assaults are still present, they are on a trajectory that is falling compared with the prison population. This is an important issue, and we want to work with the prison officers on it.

David Howarth: In his speech at the RSA yesterday, the Lord Chancellor prefaced some rather sensible remarks—about reducing reoffending rates and crime by putting what works first—with some frankly weird remarks about punishment for the sake of punishment. It was that part of his speech that he pre-released to the media. Does he not see that when he chases the headlines in that way, he undermines the case for putting what works first? It is not the offenders who suffer as a consequence of that, but the victims of the crimes that would have been prevented if we had been in a position to do more of what works.

Jack Straw: The hon. Gentleman is entitled to his own view of my speech, but it is not the case that I was talking about punishment for the sake of punishment. I was drawing to the attention of my audience, and to that of those involved in criminal justice in the widest sense, that it is this Parliament, in one statute after another—not least in the principal sentencing statute, the Criminal Justice Act 2003—that sets out the punishment of the offender as the first principle of sentencing. We need to understand—perhaps the Liberal Democrats do not understand it—that that is what the public and the victims expect, although not in an unpleasant, nasty or inhumane way, as I made very clear. We need to ensure that the courts and everyone else associated with the criminal justice system use language that connects with where the public and the victims are. I went on to talk about the importance of reform alongside that.

Ann Cryer: Is my right hon. Friend aware that many trade unionists are demonstrating and lobbying here today on the issue of recognising pleural plaques as an industrial disease? When will he take the decision on this matter, and why is it taking such a while?

Jack Straw: I am indeed aware of today's lobby and demonstrations. I fully understand the concern of all who are here and the people they represent about the implications of the Law Lords' decision last October. The consultation that I initiated earlier this year closed three weeks ago. We have received more than 300 responses to it and we are currently assessing them. I hope to announce our response next month.

John Baron: May I press the Secretary of State to review the end of custody licence scheme as a matter of urgency? Since its introduction, nearly 800 crimes have been committed by offenders who should have been in prison. When it was introduced it was described as temporary, yet official prison population projections suggest that it will continue indefinitely. Will the right hon. Gentleman review the scheme, for the sake of the safety of the law-abiding majority?

Jack Straw: I repeat what I said to the hon. Gentleman's colleagues earlier. It is a temporary measure. The release is for two and a half weeks, not four months, in advance of when the sentence is due to end in any event. As for prison population projections, the hon. Gentleman will know that these are, and always have been, imprecise. There are high, medium and low trajectories. What I am trying to do, working hard with my colleagues in the Department and the Prison Service, is to ensure that we have sufficient headroom to be able to end the scheme. Unfortunately, I cannot say at the moment exactly when that will be—I wish I could—but as soon as I judge it safe to do so, the scheme will be ended.

Alan Beith: What steps is the Secretary of State taking to discharge his duty to represent the Isle of Man Government in their dispute with the Icelandic Government over the failed Kaupthing bank? Will he initiate wider discussions on whether loan assistance to the Isle of Man Government would enable depositors in that bank, including UK depositors, to get some of their money?

Jack Straw: I have received no direct representations personally on behalf of the Isle of Man Government. I am aware, however, that there have been discussions between the Isle of Man Government and the Treasury.

Helen Southworth: Will my right hon. Friend confirm that no decision has yet been made on the site of a titan prison in the north-west? Will he take note that the Omega site in Warrington is one of regional economic significance and intended to create a business park, building up to 24,000 high-technology jobs, and is completely unsuitable to be a titan prison site?

David Hanson: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her question. She will know—we met and discussed the matter last week—that as of now, no decision has been taken on any titan site, whether it be in the north-west or any other part of England and Wales. We are committed to look for a site in the north-west, together with one in the south-east and one in the west midlands, but we will take the decision only after consideration of the results of the consultation on the titan programme that I recently announced.

David Evennett: I noted the Secretary of State's comments on the early release scheme, but why are the Government continuing with the early release of violent offenders, including those who have committed domestic violence, without a substantial risk assessment or accommodation check before they are released?

Jack Straw: I say again that there is a whole series of exclusions from the end of custody licence scheme, and they include serious violent and sexual offenders. I wish that no alleged reoffending had occurred by anyone released under the scheme, but the fact that the number is so low—1 per cent. of the total—indicates that those who made the assessments and constructed the scheme did as well overall as it was possible to do in the circumstances in which it was necessary to introduce it.

Linda Riordan: Will the Minister outline the Government's plans to change the policy of overcharging prisoners for phone calls to their families? All the evidence shows that if the calls were charged at the same rate as normal telephone calls, reoffending would fall considerably as a result of greater contact with offenders' families.

David Hanson: My hon. Friend is right: contact with families is crucial. We are currently engaged in consultations and discussions with providers about the cost of telephone calls. As my hon. Friend will know, contracts are already in place, but I am looking into what steps can be taken at their conclusion to reduce the cost of calls further.

Anne McIntosh: What plans has the Secretary of State for Justice to revisit the sentencing guidelines dating from 2003, particularly those relating to aggravated offences of burglary and shoplifting, to ensure that the most stringent sentences can be given? He will be aware of the poignant case, reported today, in which a burglar used aggression and violence towards a pregnant lady and her young daughter. Although the judge wished to hand down a custodial sentence, the guidelines prevented him from doing so.

Jack Straw: All the guidelines are kept under review, but the House will understand that I cannot comment on that particular case in any detail, for two reasons: first, it would be inappropriate in any event, and secondly, all the information that I have is from the newspaper report, which, although it may be entirely accurate, is bound to be selective. What I have done, however—I invite the House to do the same—is examine both the lead decision by the Court of Appeal in McInerney and Keating and the guidelines. The guidelines clearly allow the existence of a vulnerable victim, along with other circumstances that appear to parallel those mentioned in the report, to constitute an aggravating factor, and allow the issuing of a custodial sentence in such circumstances.
	It is important for everyone to understand that these are guidelines. Courts can and do depart from them. When they do, there may be an appeal, but it is then for the Court of Appeal to make its own judgments. Nothing whatever in the guidelines could force a sentencer to make a decision against his or her own will and judgment if, having taken account of all the circumstances, he or she believed that there should be a departure from the guidelines. If there is any argument about that, it can safely be left to later decisions by the Court of Appeal criminal division—and I repeat that the guidelines themselves provide for aggravating factors, and explicitly define the existence of a vulnerable victim as an aggravating factor.

Speaker's Statement

Mr. Speaker: I have a statement to make. I have looked into the matter that was raised by the hon. Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis) on Thursday. The position is, as he said, that the licence for the use of loudhailers has run out, and I have caused that to be drawn to the attention of Westminster council.
	As the hon. Gentleman also said, legislation governing this matter, and the powers needed by the police to ensure the proper functioning of Parliament, are still being considered. I would expect consultation by the Government with myself and with the House authorities. I hope that the concerns of Members, staff and others who come here—in terms of both access to the building and disturbance from noise—will have been duly taken into account when the legislative proposals are put before the House.

Gamma-Butyrolactone (Prohibition)

Joan Ryan: I beg to move,
	That leave be given to bring in a Bill to provide for the classification of gamma-butyrolactone as a Class C drug under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971; and for connected purposes.
	I know from conversations with the Roofie Foundation, Europe's only drug-assisted rape agency, that there are date rape victims in my constituency, and many other Members—indeed, far too many—will find that the same applies in their constituencies.
	The Government have already taken firm action to tackle date rape. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 formally acknowledged it as a crime, and made it an offence punishable by up to 10 years in prison to administer any stupefying substance with the intent of overpowering the victim in order to engage him or her in sexual activity. Over the past few years, the Government have also outlawed the most commonly used date-rape drugs. I refer in particular to ketamine, Rohypnol and gamma-hydroxybutyric acid. I welcome that action, and urge the Government to continue in the same vein with gamma-butyrolactone, or GBL as it is more commonly known. GBL is an industrial solvent, and is a common component in cleaning products. Although it does have legitimate uses, it is increasingly being used to facilitate date rape, and as a recreational drug. In fact, as the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs points out, there is evidence that it is precisely because GHB was outlawed that we have seen an increase in the use of GBL, with users switching to an almost identical, but entirely legal, alternative. Indeed, as GHB has already been banned and GBL turns into GHB on ingestion, there is already an a priori case for extending that ban to GBL.
	The precise effects of GBL will, of course, vary according to the user and the dose taken, but it is likely to leave the victim confused, dazed, drowsy, and even unconscious, thereby rendering them incapable of resisting sexual advances. These effects may occur within as little as 15 minutes, and can last for up to 8 hours. It is also a popular choice of drug because it is so difficult to spot. When dissolved in soft drinks, beers and spirits, it is colourless, odourless, invisible and indiscernible in taste. GBL is undetectable in blood and urine after 10 to 12 hours. Not only is it, therefore, difficult for the victim to spot, but it is difficult to trace once the attack has taken place.
	It is precisely because it is so difficult to prosecute for date rape and secure convictions that the law needs to be used to prevent drugs such as GBL from being available. At present, the police have no power to confiscate GBL, and clubs cannot say to a customer, "We know that liquid is illegal and we are calling the police". They can act only when an offence involving GBL has been committed, but, unfortunately, this is often too late—not only too late in terms of the chances of securing a conviction, but, more importantly, too late for the women themselves.
	Although my remarks today will focus on the dangers of GBL when used in the commission of date rape, its use is by no means limited to that. It is also widely used as a recreational drug, particularly on the clubbing scene, where it is considered a kind of cheaper liquid ecstasy. Although it can induce feelings of euphoria and disinhibition, its effects are most certainly not benign, and it has been implicated in two deaths in the past month alone. Such loss of life is avoidable, and if the Government are serious about tackling date rape, as I believe they have shown themselves to be, it is essential that this loophole is closed as a matter of urgency.
	In fact, the Government accept that case. In 2006, the Home Office asked the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs—the independent body whose role is to advise Government on drug control in the UK—to look into GBL, and its response was unambiguous: GBL should be brought under the control of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, and classified as a class C drug. Such a proposal, moreover, commands cross-party support; my Bill has sponsors from across the House. It also has the backing of the experts in this area; my Bill is supported by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, the Roofie Foundation and nightclubs themselves. It also enjoys popular support, as evidenced by the number of people who have signed up to the petition launched by  Cosmopolitan magazine. However, despite the recommendations of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, two years on GBL is still perfectly legal.
	The question therefore is not why GBL should be prohibited, but why GBL has not already been outlawed. My fear is that GHB and GBL are not only chemically similar, but that they will follow a similarly protracted route to prohibition. It was in the early 1990s that people first became aware of GHB, and in particular of its use in cases of date rape, but it was not outlawed until 2003; in other words, that took a decade, and a plethora of reports and consultations, all of which confirmed that GHB should be a controlled substance.
	Two years have already passed since the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs first recommended GBL's prohibition, and it is still perfectly legal to supply GBL. It is quick and straightforward and frighteningly easy to buy GBL, particularly online. In addition, as the recent report in  Cosmopolitan highlighted, there are no checks or controls on its purchase. At £25 for 250 ml, it is also extremely cheap, with an active dose costing somewhere in the region of 8p. Meanwhile, an untold number of women are put at risk.
	As I understand it, the principal obstacle blocking the prohibition of GBL is its legitimate use, particularly in the manufacturing and chemical industries. I do not seek to deny that GBL has legitimate uses, and I accept that it is widely used as an industrial solvent. What I find difficult to believe, however, is that an industrial solvent being sold in bottles of 250 ml to private citizens in central London, with same-day delivery, is actually being used for legitimate industrial purposes.
	What needs to happen, and what my Bill provides for, is an end to the open market for GBL. At the moment anyone can buy it for any purpose, without having to specify that purpose. My Bill would make GBL a controlled substance under the 1971 Act, but that would not mean that it could not be used for legitimate purposes. All that would be required of those who needed GBL for legitimate purposes would be to make an application to the relevant authorities. The provisions for that are contained in the 1971 Act itself. That is precisely how GBL is managed in the United States, which has classified it as a schedule 1 drug without precipitating the collapse of its chemical industry. That GBL has legitimate uses is no excuse for inaction.
	Yesterday, I spoke to a young woman, 22 years of age and a victim of these substances. Her drink was spiked and she suffered a 25-minute seizure. It was only thanks to the skill of the doctors and nurses who treated her that she survived at all. Her health is poor and she now needs to use a wheelchair. The consequences for her will last a lifetime.
	The case for the prohibition of GBL is clear. It would protect women without putting unnecessary burdens on its legitimate use. I only hope that we address this problem now, before any more victims without redress are created.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	Bill ordered to be brought in by Joan Ryan, Bob Spink, Mr. Elfyn Llwyd, Mr. Lee Scott, David Cairns, Mr. John Leech, Mr. Mike Hancock, Siobhain McDonagh, Liz Blackman and Julie Morgan.

Gamma-Butyrolactone (prohibition)

Joan Ryan accordingly presented a Bill to provide for the classification of gamma-butyrolactone as a Class C drug under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971; and for connected purposes: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time on Friday 7 November, and to be printed [Bill 156].

Orders of the Day

Climate Change Bill [ Lords]

As amended in the Public Bill Committee, considered.

New Clause 15
	 — 
	Advice on emissions from international aviation and international shipping

'(1) It is the duty of the Committee to advise the Secretary of State on the consequences of treating emissions of targeted greenhouse gases from—
	(a) international aviation, and
	(b) international shipping,
	as emissions from sources in the United Kingdom for the purposes of Part 1.
	(2) The duty applies if and to the extent that regulations under section 29 do not provide for such emissions to be so treated.
	(3) Advice given by the Committee under this section must also contain the reasons for that advice.
	(4) The Committee must give its advice under this section—
	(a) when it gives its advice under section 33 for the budgetary period 2023-2027, and
	(b) when it gives its advice under that section for each subsequent budgetary period.
	(5) The Committee must, at the time it gives its advice under this section to the Secretary of State, send a copy to the other national authorities.
	(6) As soon as is reasonably practicable after giving its advice to the Secretary of State, the Committee must publish that advice in such manner as it considers appropriate.'.— [Joan Ruddock.]
	 Brought up, and read the First time.

Joan Ruddock: I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

Mr. Speaker: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
	New clause 14— International aviation and shipping emissions
	'(1) The Secretary of State shall lay before Parliament a report including—
	(a) a projection of the level of emissions he expects to arise from international aviation and shipping which are the result of UK economic activity,
	(b) an explanation of the methodology used to make this emissions projection, and
	(c) the way in which any carbon budgets have been adjusted to take account of such projections.
	(2) When making the above projection, the Secretary of State shall have regard to international carbon reporting practice.
	(3) The projection shall cover any year for which a carbon budget has been set, and may include any other years that the Secretary of State considers appropriate.'.
	Amendment No. 68, in clause 10, page 6, line 26, at end insert—
	'(i) the emission of greenhouse gases from international aviation or international shipping that the Secretary of State expects to arise during the budget period, as reported pursuant to section 15(5A).'.
	Amendment No. 72, page 6, line 26, at end insert—
	'(i) the emissions of greenhouse gases from international aviation or international shipping that the Secretary of State expects to arise during the budget period.'.
	Amendment No. 69, in clause 27, page 15, line 24, at end insert—
	'(5A) If emissions of a greenhouse gas from international aviation or international shipping are not required to be included in the statement by virtue of subsection (2), it must state the level of such emissions that the Secretary of State expects he will have to report in accordance with international carbon reporting practice for each budget period for which a budget has been set.'.
	Government amendment No. 36.
	Amendment No. 3, in clause 29, page 16, line 9, leave out out from 'Kingdom' to end of line 13.
	Government amendments Nos. 42, 43 and 50.

Joan Ruddock: Before setting out my reasons for tabling the new clause, I should like to pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, East and Saddleworth (Mr. Woolas), who led on all the earlier stages of the Bill, and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who led the discussions in Cabinet.
	International aviation and shipping have long been contentious issues in relation to climate change and the subject of much Back-Bench interest, as illustrated by the huge support for the early-day motion tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, South (Nigel Griffiths). The Government agree that action to reduce emissions from international aviation and shipping will be vital to global efforts to tackle climate change, which is why we are taking forward a range of measures to reduce the impact of international aviation and shipping on the environment.
	Discussions on including international aviation and shipping in a post-2012 regime under the Kyoto principle have begun, and the UK is actively lobbying for support within the international community. Following pressure from the UK, legislation to include aviation in the European Union's emissions trading scheme has been signed off in Europe, and it is expected to save about 200 million tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2020. We are also working with the International Civil Aviation Organisation on international aviation and climate change to try to reach agreement on targets that will drive increased action on emissions in the aviation sector. We continue to press for an international emissions trading scheme for the maritime sector under the International Maritime Organisation.
	The Government recognise the need to give serious consideration to how emissions from international aviation and shipping are approached in the Climate Change Bill. That is why we agreed to the approach proposed by the other place: that either those emissions should be included in the Bill's targets and budgets within five years of Royal Assent or an explanation should be laid before Parliament stating why that has not been done. I want to attach as much certainty and transparency as possible to this requirement, and amendment No. 36 would do exactly that. It would change the deadline for inclusion or explanation from within five years to 31 December 2012. That definite date is nearly a year sooner than what is currently provided for in the Bill. Furthermore, in response to the views of the shadow Committee on Climate Change, new clause 15 places a new duty on the committee to advise the Secretary of State on the consequences of including emissions from international aviation and emissions from international shipping in the targets and budgets. The committee would be required to provide that advice at the same time as it provides its advice on each carbon budget. That requirement would begin in 2011, when the committee advises on the level of the 2023 to 2027 budget, and would apply every time it advises on carbon budgets thereafter. The duty would remain in place to the extent that emissions from international aviation and shipping were not included within the Bill's targets. If emissions from international aviation were included in the future, the committee would still be under a duty to provide advice on international shipping emissions, but if, at some point, all emissions were included, the advice duty would no longer apply.

William Cash: Would the Minister care to comment on a problem that could easily arise if, on the one hand, the committee has a legal duty to give effect to the provisions that she has mentioned and, on the other, clause 6 gives the Secretary of State a power to amend in the light of European law? What would happen if European law said one thing and the committee, which had a duty to give advice to the Secretary of State, said another? Which would prevail?

Joan Ruddock: I know that the hon. Gentleman has some difficulty with European law, but I assure him that the committee would undoubtedly make proposals that would be consistent with European law.

John Gummer: Could the Minister help the House by telling us what the Government are doing to further these discussions, particularly in respect of shipping? Some indication has been given, particularly by the Danes, that we might not have been as advanced as some other countries in trying to find a suitable way to handle the difficult issue of shipping emissions. Can she assure the House that the Government will lead on this matter? The UK is historically a shipping country, so we would like to see that happen.

Joan Ruddock: I agree with the right hon. Gentleman about how important it is for the UK to be in the lead. I do not know what the Danish opinion of us is, but there is competition between our countries at times, not least in respect of offshore wind. I understand that we have been very active in the International Maritime Organisation, that we have made proposals and that we have made funds available to assist in this process. We want to do our best, and I take the right hon. Gentleman's comments seriously.
	I was explaining how the duty would cease to exist if all the emissions were included in an international agreement. The shadow committee has been considering this question in some depth. Lord Turner's recent letter to the Secretary of State gave his view that
	"the scope of the Climate Change Bill should not be extended to include international aviation and shipping".
	His reason was that it was
	"not clear how international shipping emissions could be sensibly included in UK budgets".
	He added that although
	"there are methodologies that could sensibly allocate emissions to the UK level (e.g. bunker fuels), these differ from the methodology that has been proposed for entry of aviation into EU ETS. We do not believe that the EU ETS methodology is an appropriate basis for inclusion of international aviation in UK".

Michael Weir: Did not Lord Turner also say that aviation and shipping should be included in the 80 per cent. target? If they are not to be included in the budget, how will that be reflected in the 80 per cent. target, and what will be the impact of that?

Joan Ruddock: The hon. Gentleman is correct in that Lord Turner made reference to the 80 per cent. target and to shipping and aviation emissions, but there has been considerable misunderstanding on this point. I will explain precisely what he has said and how we have responded positively to that.

Ian Gibson: Does the Minister agree that Lord Turner's assessment is for the short term and, as he goes on to say, we need to look at this important issue in the long term, as it needs a deliberate policy?

Joan Ruddock: It is apparent to all of us that we have to have short-term solutions and answers to the problems of climate change, and we also always have to plan for the long term. My hon. Friend is absolutely right about that.

John Hemming: I am slightly confused about this issue. Last Monday, the Prime Minister said that we needed a constantly rising supply of oil, notwithstanding the use of renewables. Does the Minister have any idea of whether our oil consumption is expected to fall over time—whether or not aviation and shipping are included—and in which year would we first see a fall?

Joan Ruddock: I shall not speculate on the extraneous matters that the hon. Gentleman has raised.
	The central point of what Lord Turner actually said was that policies are needed to constrain aviation and shipping emissions, but—despite these—it is unlikely that emissions in these sectors will be reduced by 80 per cent. in 2050. The consequence is that more effort is likely to be required from those sectors covered by the Bill. Government amendments Nos. 42, 43 and 50 are consequential to Government new clause 15, and ensure that appropriate references are made throughout the Bill to the proposed new clause.
	Amendment No. 69 and new clause 14 would both require the Government to publish regular projections for emissions from international aviation and shipping. We already publish projections of future CO2 emissions for international flights from UK airports and intend to continue to do so. The last reports were published in 2003, 2004 and 2007. I am happy to commit the Government to publish at least one forecast of international aviation emissions for each budgetary period sufficient to inform decisions on setting carbon budgets. Publishing projections of aviation emissions any more frequently would not deliver any benefits, as the long term drivers of the forecasts do not change significantly on an annual basis.

Steve Webb: There is a danger that we will get caught up in technical minutiae and lose sight of the big picture. The Minister has just said that it is unlikely that we will be able to reduce aviation emissions by 80 per cent. by 2050, so because we will not get tough on aviation, the rest of the economy will have to take the hit on carbon. Surely it is time that policies such as the expansion of Stansted and Heathrow came to the top of the Government's agenda, as we might then stand a better chance.

Joan Ruddock: The hon. Gentleman cannot accuse the Government of just ignoring the issue. As he must know, we have been very active within the EU in ensuring that those emissions become part of the European trading scheme. That is the way we will deal with those emissions in the first instance. We hope, in the long term, that we shall do so through some global agreement. As the hon. Gentleman knows perfectly well, if within a trading agreement some sectors are allowed to grow and as a consequence some cannot grow so much, that is a principle of trading. The cap that is set, which repeatedly goes down, will ensure that overall emissions are reduced. We have to have that in sight; it is the long-term goal. The bigger picture is to get an 80 per cent. reduction by 2050.

Andy Reed: Do we have to be so pessimistic about the contribution that aviation could make to the trading scheme? In the foreseeable future, other technologies may come along. For example, Loughborough university is looking at a variety of ways of replacing aviation fuels. Will the Minister try to ensure that there is some flexibility to allow those technologies to come forward to help to reduce the figure for aviation?

Joan Ruddock: I was, of course, paraphrasing what Lord Turner had said. It was not my personal view that emissions from aviation might continue to grow and could not be reduced by 80 per cent. by 2050. We can be optimistic, can we not? My hon. Friend makes a good point—there is new technology and we are very supportive of that. We know that new aircraft are producing lower emissions than existing ones. Much can be done in that field, although I am sure that much more will eventually have to be done, too.

Jo Swinson: May I draw the Minister back to her remarks about the reporting on different sectors? She has mentioned the publication that the Government intend to produce on aviation emissions, but she has not so far said what publication will be produced on shipping emissions. Surely there is sometimes a danger that aviation is focused on as the real problem, when in fact emissions from shipping are considerable and are predicted to as much as treble by 2050 if left unchecked.

Joan Ruddock: I understand the hon. Lady's point, and I shall come on to that eventually. The reason why aviation gets so much attention is that most of us have direct experience of flying, while fewer of us have experience of shipping. I shall explain what we are doing about shipping, too.

Tim Yeo: The Climate Change Bill has been used as an example of British leadership in the field of climate change, and quite rightly so. Britain is a leading maritime nation, too. I believe that the shipping industry is also looking for a lead from the British Government, which at the moment it is not getting. Ships being ordered today have a 30-year life, so that takes us three quarters of the way to 2050. If there is no sign of urgency about the inclusion of maritime emissions in the British Government's approach, that will be an unfortunate missed opportunity. The Chamber of Shipping gave evidence to the Select Committee on Environmental Audit this morning and made the point that its members are looking to the Government for some suggestions about how maritime emissions might be counted and included.

Joan Ruddock: Obviously, the hon. Gentleman has an advantage over me in that he was present in his Committee meeting this morning and I was not. However, we will investigate all options for reducing emissions from international and domestic shipping. That includes considering improved technology and better operator practices, which, as I am sure he is aware, can make a considerable difference. We also support the development of a global emissions trading scheme through the International Maritime Organisation. We have said clearly that should progress within the IMO prove too slow, we will consider other options, including those proposed at an EU level, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from ships. That includes investigating the feasibility of including shipping emissions in the EU ETS. We are not at all inactive on those issues, but the fact is that they are extremely difficult to deal with.

Bob Spink: Let me take the Minister back to a technical minutia. Is she convinced that the methodologies for measuring emissions, particularly on the international scale, will be robust enough in the longer term?

Joan Ruddock: I am sure the hon. Gentleman may know a little more about the technical minutiae of this matter than I do, but the Government are very conscious of the problem. We are always in discussions and seeking to improve the methodologies, but the fact that there is no agreed methodology at the moment means that we would face difficulties if we followed some of the amendments and simply included the present levels of emissions.

Gavin Strang: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, and the whole House will welcome the direction in which the Government are moving on this matter. I was interested to hear her say that the reason for the much greater focus on aviation than on shipping was that we tend to fly. That may be true, but it had never occurred to me. Does she agree that we in this country are still making far too many short flights—for example, from Edinburgh to Manchester? Clearly, the way forward must be to put much more investment into the railway, and to ensure—not necessarily through taxation, but by some other means—that there are not so many flights over short distances within the UK.

Joan Ruddock: I have, dare I say it, some sympathy with what my right hon. Friend says. The Department for Transport is developing a climate change strategy of its own and, as I said earlier, we are clear that a growth in emissions in one sector of the economy will eventually have to result in more emission reductions elsewhere. If we get to the point where all journeys are included, that mechanism will have an effect. Furthermore, all domestic flights are already included in our emissions calculations.

David Howarth: The Minister said that there was no agreed methodology, and that has been the argument all along, right back to the Joint Committee that considered the draft Bill. However, does she agree that any methodology that we adopt, even unilaterally, is sure to be closer to the end result than doing nothing would be? If we adopt a reasonable methodology now, we will have a smaller adjustment to make in the future.

Joan Ruddock: If I were allowed to make some progress with my speech, I might be able to make the counter-argument. However, I do not accept the hon. Gentleman's point because, although we could adopt a methodology now, it might have various undesirable effects, not least in the international negotiations.

Graham Stuart: I am grateful to the Minister for giving way; she has been extremely generous. Will she share with the House what she expects the cumulative impact of aviation and shipping emissions to be between now and 2050, as currently measured by the Government? She will know that, in any long-term policy to reduce emissions, the important thing is the cumulative budget between now and then. What amounts are we talking about, and what share would they take of the overall budget allowed for the UK?

Joan Ruddock: I think I would be very unwise to answer that question directly. I am sure I could find some projections, but the amounts involved are a long way ahead and will depend on global agreements, if we get them, and on emissions trading. We cannot honestly predict the extent to which aviation might or might not grow, as that will depend on the decisions that will be taken—here, in the whole of Europe and, I hope, globally. I might be able to produce a figure for the hon. Gentleman, but I am not sure that it would advance any of the arguments that are being made.

John Redwood: When the Government came to office, they inherited a fairly easy win on the Kyoto targets with the dash for gas from power generation. They strengthened their target, but why did they fail to hit that strengthened target?

Joan Ruddock: At the time, we made a prediction about what would happen to our economy, which in fact has since grown massively—

Martin Horwood: Not now.

Joan Ruddock: Of course, we are currently in some difficulties, but we have been able to grow our economy massively over the period to which the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) alludes. At the same time, we have reduced our emissions to such an extent that not only will we meet our Kyoto commitments but we will do so more than twice over. That shows that this Government have done rather well in this particular field.

Justine Greening: rose—

Joan Ruddock: I will give way, and then I will make some progress.

Justine Greening: I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. Will she clarify how the Government will track emissions? As she knows, an important decision on Heathrow is coming up. According to the Government, the emissions associated with that policy will include emissions only from outgoing flights, not from incoming flights. Common sense should tell us that extra incoming flights would not be able to land if the airport were not expanded. Will she accept that what is important in Government policy is the decisionable part of emissions? How will she approach issues such as Heathrow? In such cases, if emissions are not calculated correctly, we will take the wrong decision.

Joan Ruddock: As the hon. Lady will know, a decision has not yet been taken on Heathrow. When I continue with my speech, I will make it very clear how we are approaching the issue of emissions. I will also make it clear that if emissions are contained within the EU trading process, for example, the cap will determine what the emissions are and how the matter will be dealt with. If she will let me continue, our position will become much clearer.
	To answer an earlier question, there are currently no UK Government forecasts of emissions from UK international shipping. The nature of the shipping industry makes recording shipping emissions particularly difficult, and there are a number of data constraints. The Government continue to seek improvements to the evidence base on international shipping emissions, principally through our role at the IMO. I therefore cannot accept amendment No. 69 or new clause 14, but I hope that the House will accept my firm commitment that we will continue to publish our projections on aviation emissions regularly.
	Amendments Nos. 68 and 72 would require the Government and the Committee on Climate Change to take into account projected greenhouse gas emissions from international aviation and shipping when making any decisions relating to carbon budgets; that answers an earlier question. Amendment No. 68 makes specific reference to the projections that would be required by amendment No. 69. As I have explained, we do not agree that it is right to legislate for the publication of those projections.
	However, I am pleased to say that we can accept amendment No. 72 in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley). The Government believe that when setting or advising on budgets, due regard should be given to emissions from international aviation and shipping; my right hon. Friend and the shadow Committee on Climate Change have made that clear. We are saying that we will have due regard to emissions from aviation and shipping, as the Committee recommended, but we cannot account for them domestically at present. There are a few technical problems with amendment No. 72; for example, it refers to "budget" rather than budgetary periods, and refers not to the Committee on Climate Change, but only to the Secretary of State. It does not refer to "targeted" greenhouse gases, which is how such gases are defined in the Bill. The Government will therefore return, before final consideration in the Lords, with a version of the amendment that has benefited from parliamentary counsel's redrafting; I hope that all parties can agree to that.
	Amendment No. 3 would simply require emissions from international aviation and shipping to be included in the Bill's targets and budgets within five years of Royal Assent. That would have to be done, and nothing else could be done. We all agree that we are talking about global issues, and that a global solution would be the best way forward; I hope that I have made that clear. Such a solution would be much more difficult if we had a domestic deadline for deciding what the UK's fair share was. It is possible for us to reach international agreement, through the United Nations framework convention on climate change, the IMO or the International Civil Aviation Organisation, that the best way to deal with international aviation or shipping emissions is through a sectoral approach, rather than through allocating such emissions to individual countries. In fact, that is one of the approaches already under discussion. The point is about methodologies. We could end up with a completely different proposal, so it would not be appropriate for us to make a unilateral decision. Indeed, we are already starting to see such an approach at EU level, where it is likely that under the EU emissions trading scheme, aviation emissions will be allocated to airlines rather than to individual member states.

David Howarth: I thank the Minister for giving way, perhaps at the right part of her speech now. If we in the UK take the lead, will we not shape the international debate and push the final solution of the problem to a position closer to what is in our interests, rather than in other countries' interests, whereas if we leave the negotiations to others we will not do that?

Joan Ruddock: I have to tell the hon. Gentleman that there is no question of our leaving the negotiations to others. We are right there in the forefront of the negotiations. It is the UK Government who pushed for the inclusion of international aviation and shipping emissions in the EU trading scheme. We succeeded in persuading other member states that that should be done, and it will be done. Adopting a measure in the Bill that could be completely out of line, as the amendments suggest, with what we are negotiating in Europe is obviously the wrong thing to do.
	The questions concerning shipping emissions are even more complex. If we were to include shipping emissions in any of the existing agreements or future agreements such as global agreements, we would have even more problems than we clearly have with airlines. I have outlined how we might deal with aviation through the European trading scheme, but the difficulty with ships is that they can go for many weeks without refuelling, and can take on fuel from tankers in international waters. If we based our calculations only on fuel that has been sold in the UK, it would appear that shipping emissions declined over the past 10 years and then began to rise again. However, we know that that is not the case. We know that shipping has continued to increase, so we must assume that emissions have increased as well. Clearly, relying on bunker fuels is not the answer.

John Gummer: I am sympathetic to the concept that the Minister advances: that her hands should not be tied by writing into the Bill of answers that may well be the opposite of what will be in our interests or in the interests of reducing emissions. Does she agree, however, that the concomitant is that the Government must be extremely loud about the negotiations, making sure that people realise that we are taking the lead and that there is no excuse for delay on this front? Shipping is hugely important to the United Kingdom and hugely important if we are to do something about emissions.

Joan Ruddock: The right hon. Gentleman is correct. We want to remain in the forefront and I am sure he will keep us up to the mark.
	Finally, and especially if we are acting alone, there is the risk of perverse impacts, such as planes and ships filling up elsewhere and coming to the UK with a heavier fuel load, of air traffic simply diverting from Heathrow to Amsterdam or Paris, or of some ships with UK-bound cargo diverting to a continental port from where the cargo is delivered to the UK by another ship or another mode of transport. All those scenarios could increase emissions, rather than reduce them.

Peter Lilley: Can the hon. Lady assure us that despite her distinguished lifetime career advocating unilateralism, nothing in the measure will unilaterally hamstring our aviation or maritime industries if other countries do not follow suit?

Joan Ruddock: I have just explained the complexity of including shipping emissions, whether unilaterally or within the EU emissions trading scheme. There are real difficulties. I gave the example of the calculations based on bunker fuels purchased in the UK and the fact that they gave a totally incorrect reading of what has been happening to UK shipping. The right hon. Gentleman should understand the complexity of the matter. It has to be sorted out and we have to find a way forward. That means that it is not sensible to adopt a measure today on our own behalf.
	As I have said, we need a flexible approach to the evolving international context. I hope people understand that we are anxious to make progress on international aviation and shipping emissions, but we need to do that first in a European context and then in the global context. We will do what we can to take account of the necessary factors. I hope that amendment No. 3 will not be pressed to a Division.

Gregory Barker: We warmly welcome the Government's change of heart and measured response in including emissions from international aviation and shipping in the Bill. We support new clause 15 and its accompanying amendments Nos. 36, 42, 43 and 50, which I understand are important tidying measures. Although we also recognise the real and practical difficulties, which the Minister has explained, of including aviation and shipping and although we acknowledge the danger of perverse incentives if we get the issue wrong, we think it right that aviation and shipping are included.
	Conservative Front Benchers have consistently argued that aviation and shipping should not be exempt from accounting for the pollution for which their sectors are responsible. Furthermore, as the Minister said, not including aviation in the Bill would have perverse incentives. For example, it would incentivise an individual passenger, from a carbon point of view, to take a short-haul flight to Paris rather than the Eurostar. That cannot be right.
	We should also be mindful of the positive way in which the shipping sector and certain responsible airlines have contributed to the debate: they have made important and constructive suggestions on the way forward. We must not forget that shipping is among the most carbon-efficient forms of heavy transport. Sea freight emits between 30 g and 90 g of CO2 per tonne of freight per kilometre, whereas the equivalent figure for road freight is between 130g and 190g, and that for aviation is obviously much, much more.
	We must therefore be cautious about always twinning aviation and shipping in this debate, as their carbon efficiency profiles contrast and they face different challenges specific to their sectors. We all acknowledge that there are difficulties with the measurement and apportionment of these emissions. However, it is important that we do not allow such issues of methodology, complex as they are, to let us lose sight of the principal aim of the Bill: to achieve a net reduction in emissions across the whole UK economy in sufficient proportion for us to play our fair part in keeping man-made global warming below the dangerous 2° level.
	The necessity of eventually including all sectors of our economy in that task was reconfirmed to us earlier this month by the advice of Lord Adair Turner's Committee on Climate Change. Mindful of that advice, we are sympathetic to amendments Nos. 68 and 69, tabled by the hon. Member for Edinburgh, South (Nigel Griffiths). We are also sympathetic to amendment No. 3 and new clause 14, tabled by the hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb).
	Methodology is crucial, so the Government need to publish their methodology for making their aviation and shipping emission projections, as would be required by new clause 14. That is particularly important to us. We welcome the announcement just now that the Government have taken on board the intent embodied in amendment No. 72. The right hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley) has done a great deal of work: he has campaigned outside the House and brought together a large consensus on the measure. We welcome the fact that the Government are prepared to take the issue on board and, having redrafted it with the help of parliamentary counsel, bring it back to the House of Lords. That is typical of the spirit in which the Bill has gone through the House.
	Having made our support for this proposal clear, I should like to sound a note of caution regarding the definition of aviation and shipping that the Government have chosen. Although we welcome the fact that they intend to include emissions from aviation and shipping, the measurement of emissions from the movement of goods and passengers should account for all stages of the journey rather than merely singling out the carbon footprint of flights and sea journeys to and from the United Kingdom. In that way, we could avoid unintended consequences such as encouraging more polluting methods of travel outside the UK. My party is committed to working with the Government in their efforts to secure the all-important international agreements on aviation and shipping emissions that are crucial if we are to crack this problem.
	The Bill has come a long way since it was first introduced in another place last year. Now, on Report, one of the last outstanding totemic issues is finally being dealt with. If we can come to an agreement on this, it will turn the Bill from good legislation into world-class legislation. However, the caveats on definitions that Conservative Members spoke about at length in Committee and in the other place still remain. Although we are concerned about the definition of aviation and shipping, rather than our chosen definition of international trade and transport, we are not opposed to including aviation and shipping in the carbon budgets from the outset. Our concern is rooted in our wish to ensure that we do not, through well-meaning but poorly designed legislation, offer a perverse incentive to use more carbon-intensive modes of transport, such as road freight, over the more efficient moving of goods by sea. For example, if shipping becomes heavily regulated, particularly unilaterally, there might be an incentive for ships to dock at Rotterdam—or worse still, Istanbul—and then drive across the continent to enter this country via the channel tunnel. That is why we argued in Committee for aviation and shipping to be described as international trade and transport. We wish to prevent any system of measurement from being skewed in favour of more carbon-intensive methods of transport, which could happen if shipping and aviation are included without reference to other modes of transportation.
	Let me give some practical examples. If one were importing oranges from Spain into the UK and sent them over on lorries, only the short leg of the journey, by ferry, would be included in the UK's carbon allowance. If one sent them by sea, the whole journey would be counted, making transporting oranges from Spain by sea far more carbon-expensive. That would create a significant incentive for the use of road freight over sea freight, despite its being many times more carbon-intensive. If national-level emissions trading schemes were in existence through the transit states, the disincentive to use road freight would be strong enough to deter that, but if we introduced our system before some or all of our neighbouring European transit states, Britain would perversely incentivise the movement of goods away from direct shipping and towards the more polluting form of road transport. Similarly, when importing goods from China, the best way in terms of cost and the environment is for the container to be shipped directly to the UK. If we define only aviation and shipping without reference to other means of importing goods, that could mean it would make economic sense to ship goods only as far as Rotterdam and then move them by lorry into the UK in order to minimise the amount of carbon officially being counted.
	I hope I have made the point sufficiently clear without sounding as though we are opposed to the inclusion of aviation and shipping, as per the amendment, but it is very important. We are in favour of these measures, and we have always argued that there should be no sectoral exemptions for aviation and shipping, but the definition of the process can still be improved. We would be keen to work closely with the Government on establishing a means of description that is more effective and would secure the international agreements on aviation and shipping that are vital if we are to find a truly holistic solution to this very important international problem.

John Redwood: Is my hon. Friend saying he is worried that the Government have not done enough work on possible dispersion of industry and activity out of the UK and into other centres? That would seem to be an own goal of the worst kind because it would not reduce carbon output, but it would reduce the number of jobs.

Gregory Barker: That is a far more concise way of putting the rather laboured argument that I was trying to make from the Dispatch Box.
	This is a complex area. It is not beyond our ken to crack it, and some very sensible points have been made from colleagues on the Opposition Benches about the unintended consequences of including aviation and shipping. We do not want to lose sight of the principal aim of including those sectors in a way that makes them responsible for their own carbon pollution, but my right hon. Friend is absolutely right, and with his experience as a former Secretary of State and from his considerable business career he is well placed to understand the complexities and dangers that could be posed to our competitive position. That should not, however, prevent us from offering to work constructively with the Government on the matter; if they unable to do it, an incoming Conservative Government would certainly want to work closely with the aviation and shipping industry to ensure that a satisfactory answer was reached in order to allow carbon measurements to be made, but in a way that did not harm unduly our international competitive position.

John Hemming: I am a little confused by the Prime Minister saying that we need an ever-increasing supply of oil. Does the hon. Gentleman believe that as a result of the Bill there will be a reduction in the amount of crude oil used by this country?

Gregory Barker: I do not think there is going to be an immediate reduction in the amount of crude oil used as a result of this Bill, because the Bill is simply a framework. It is a form of regulating and auditing our emissions; it sets targets. What we need to follow the Bill is a really ambitious transformational set of policies, which will allow an incoming Conservative Government to effect the sort of dynamic changes that have been so absent during the past 10 years, but without harming our international competitive position. The big danger of the Bill is that people place too much emphasis on the targets and auditing mechanisms contained in it, which are then mistaken for policies that will deliver the transformation to a low-carbon economy that is imperative. We will not find them in the Energy Bill. A whole range of policies are sadly lacking from this Government, but would not be lacking from an incoming Conservative Administration.

Elliot Morley: I warmly welcome the contribution to the debate made by my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary, particularly her acceptance of amendment No. 72, which stands in my name. I would like to emphasise that it is in my name only because it was tabled very late, and I want to pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, South (Nigel Griffiths), who has been very active in this matter. I am pleased to support the amendments that stand in his name and those of many hon. Friends, many of whom are present.
	My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary knows that the issue we are discussing is of key interest to many members of the public and non-governmental organisations, and I agree with the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker) that the improvements to the Bill and the scrutiny as it has gone through the parliamentary process have turned it into a piece of world-class legislation that gives a strong international lead. By accepting the amendment to take aviation and shipping into account, the Bill will send a clear signal internationally that including such emissions is the way that we have to go.
	I accept that there has also to be international agreement on the matter. It was a great failing of the original Kyoto protocol that the bunker fuel agreement was not included. We all know the reasons for that—it was not possible to get international agreement, particularly given the resistance from the United States and others. We all know that whatever the outcome of the forthcoming elections in the US there will be a change of position, and I hope that that transfers to including aviation and shipping in the post-Kyoto 2012 framework, as we must. The European Union emissions trading scheme helps in that respect, and it may drive that change.
	I would confirm what my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary said: the agreement on including aviation was reached under the UK presidency of the EU. It was a British initiative and a British priority. The UK presidency managed to get that agreement, which I believe to be so important. I also understand the point that the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle made about perverse incentives, although the logic of that is to include all sectors of the economy—at some point, surface transport must be included in the EU ETS—but those are matters for future negotiation.
	I reinforce the point that many groups are pleased about this. I acknowledge the contribution of the Friends of the Earth Big Ask campaign, which included the two key elements: the 80 per cent. target, which has been conceded, and the inclusion of aviation and shipping, which is being conceded tonight. That will strengthen the Bill; the two issues are vital.

Nick Hurd: I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on his amendment, which I support in principle. I note that the Government are minded to accept it, so I press him to define a little more tightly or expand a little on what he understands by "taken into account"?

Elliot Morley: There must be provision and planning, as there are for the 2012 time limit, to ensure that aviation and shipping are taken into account and included in carbon budgets. Lord Turner's committee acknowledged that, although he recognised the current difficulties with agreeing international methodology and getting international agreements. It is imperative to achieve those and I hope that that will happen by 2009, when the all-important forum of the United Nations climate change convention at Copenhagen takes place. To fail to secure international agreement would be a global disaster. However, including such elements in the Bill demonstrates that the Government are serious about the matter. They are giving a clear lead to the rest of the world that those elements must be included if we are to move to a low-carbon future.

Steve Webb: Although we welcome the new clause and the Government's acceptance of the spirit of amendment No. 72, which the right hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley) tabled, we remain concerned that the guarantees that the nation—and, indeed, the planet—seeks from the British Government about aviation and shipping are not firm enough. Although we may have confidence in the Under-Secretary and the new Secretary of State—any Secretary of State whose first act is to add his name to a Liberal Democrat amendment cannot be all bad—what about their heirs and successors? Can we be confident that future Secretaries of State, who are perhaps not so committed, will be bound by the amendments? We contend that they will not and that, in addition to the new clause, we need new clause 14. We welcome the supportive comments of the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker) about new clause 14, on which I suspect we will test the opinion of the House later.
	We are concerned about new clause 15 because of its advisory nature. "Advise" or "advice" appear nine times in it—it is an entirely advisory clause. That would be fine if the Government were bound by the advice but, by definition, one is not bound by advice. Amendment No. 3 would remove the opt-out. The Government have the option after five years of saying, "This is all terribly difficult—we're not going to do it." Our worry is that aviation and shipping are so important that, if five years of the best brains around the globe getting together cannot crack the problem, we are genuinely in trouble. We do not want to give the Government the option after five years of slipping out a written statement on the last day of a parliamentary Session to claim that they had tried hard but could not include aviation and shipping because it was too difficult. There is not enough of a guarantee that those matters will be taken into account.
	Although I am beginning to understand the theology of such issues, I cannot understand why the new clause and amendment No. 72, as redrafted, guarantee anything. They are a nudge and a wink and a hint from a well-disposed Secretary of State and Under-Secretary, but they guarantee nothing, especially when Ministers change and others may not be so committed. We therefore need to beef up those amendments.
	New clause 14 states that the Government need to provide projections on aviation and shipping. We welcome the Minister's assurance that the projections on aviation will be forthcoming and updated, but simply saying that shipping is too difficult, which is essentially the position, is inadequate. We need to resolve those difficulties. We need an approximation to the best guess, and doing that is not a science; it is an art. However, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) said, doing nothing is likely to be an awful lot further away from the optimal solution than having an approximation, an imputation or an assumption.
	Our second concern is about the role of national leadership. I fully accept that in time everything will need to be done multilaterally, but we are not playing a game in which we cannot make a move until everybody else has moved. We are talking about a vital issue on which we need to lead by example and bring others with us. If we say, "We're not going to include these things until everybody else does or until we've decided altogether how to do it", the clock will be ticking in the meantime. That is our profound concern.

John Hemming: Will my hon. Friend give way?

Steve Webb: If it is about oil, no.  [ Laughter. ] Of course I will give way.

John Hemming: I thank my hon. Friend for giving way to my standard question about oil. Last week the Prime Minister said that we needed an ever-increasing supply of oil, which confused me in the light of our objective of having a low-carbon economy, because burning oil creates carbon dioxide and water primarily. Will my hon. Friend share his views on whether we can satisfy the objectives of the Bill, with or without the inclusion of aviation and shipping, while having an ever-increasing supply of oil?

Steve Webb: I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for that helpful intervention. From our perspective we need to get on with decarbonising the economy. The goal of an ever-increasing supply of oil is literally nonsense and should certainly not be an aim of Government policy.
	The point that I made in an intervention on the Minister is that it might be great that the Department of Energy and Climate Change sets such bold targets, but as long as the Department for Transport, for example, continues to act as if it were a wholly owned subsidiary of BAA, we will not achieve what we need to. It is vital to bring aviation and shipping within the scope of the Bill, so that the other bits of Government, which are perhaps not quite as well disposed towards tackling climate change as the Department of Energy and Climate Change is, are brought into line. The sooner we do that, the smaller the chance that irreversible decisions will be taken on airport expansion—decisions that would undermine the goal that we all share of tackling climate change effectively.
	We welcome new clause 15 and the advice that will be forthcoming, but we simply do not believe that it goes far enough. In addition, we need the projections provided for in our new clause 14 and a calculation of what that means for non-aviation and shipping carbon emissions. The Minister's view seems to be that the rest of the economy can just take the hit, because as long as the grand total is okay, we are all happy. However, the rest of the economy might have a view on taking more of a hit than aviation and shipping simply because aviation and shipping were not included in the budgets.
	There is an equity issue, too. We might have a view, for example, on how fair it is to expect manufacturing to take the entire hit because aviation and shipping have been allowed to run away with their emissions. There is an equity issue to do with the balance of reducing emissions, not only at household level but between different sectors of the economy. Favourable treatment towards one sector, which would be likely if we did not bring it within the Bill, is undesirable for us all.

Nick Hurd: The hon. Gentleman started his speech with the premise that the Bill places no absolute requirement on the Government to include aviation and shipping in the budgets or the targets. That is correct, but I have struggled to follow how his new clause 14 would change that. I can see that it might improve the transparency of some of the information going into the mix, but it does not change the basic premise of his argument, does it?

Steve Webb: As the hon. Gentleman rightly says, our new clause 14 would require projections on aviation and shipping that would otherwise not be made, which would deliver an impact assessment on the rest of the economy. As he knows, our concern is about the actions of future Governments. The consequence of our proposal would be for other sectors of the economy to exert more pressure to include aviation and shipping, because it would be much more transparent that they would take the hit. That would be an indirect way of bringing pressure on future Governments not to neglect the other sectors of the economy.

Graham Stuart: Does the hon. Gentleman's point about the impact of aviation and shipping not show the absurdity at the heart of the Bill? Independent studies show that a 75 per cent. increase in emissions from shipping is expected in the next 15 to 20 years and that emissions from shipping already constitute more than double those from aviation globally. The fact that we are introducing an 80 per cent. reduction today while critical elements of delivering it are not within the power of the Secretary of State shows that we are posturing and not really putting down legally enforceable limits on emissions. In the meantime, we are failing to take the practical actions that could be taken to deliver emissions changes today.

Steve Webb: I partly agree with the hon. Gentleman, in the sense that we certainly need a legal framework and practical, urgent action now. His point highlights the fact that the Government's approach to aviation and shipping is almost one of "predict and provide". They are almost saying, "We will let that rip, and then we will pick up the pieces in the rest of the economy." That is why we cannot go on risking excluding those elements.
	We are sure that the Government's intentions are good, but we do not believe that even this Government—and certainly not future Governments—will be bound by what is in new clause 15 or amendment No. 72. We are therefore seeking to add new clause 14 to the Bill.

Gavin Strang: I think that the whole House welcomes the movement by the Government in this area. I congratulate the Under-Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Joan Ruddock), and I particularly welcome the fact that the Government are accepting the amendment tabled in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley).
	My hon. Friend the Minister rightly referred to the important interim advice from the Committee on Climate Change in the letter earlier this month to the Secretary of State of the new Department from the Committee's chairman, Lord Adair Turner. I want to highlight two or three important sentences in the letter. The advice provides the basis for the Government's movement, but it should also send an important message to Parliament and the Government about the decisive action that we need to take on this issue in the coming years. As we all know, the important recommendations were that the target for the reduction in emissions covered by the Bill—between 1990 and 2050, which is quite a long way ahead—should be 80 per cent., and that the target should include international aviation and shipping.
	In an important point in the letter, Lord Turner explains the reasons for the change. He sets out what has changed since the report from the historic royal commission on environmental pollution in 2000, which is where the original 60 per cent. target came from. He lists six things that have changed, but I shall not refer to all of them today. However, I want to quote one of them. By way of an introduction to that, I want to point out that he suggests that
	"the dangers of significant climate change are greater than previously assessed which argues for larger global, and thus UK, reductions."
	He makes six points, and in point No. 5, he states that
	"there is now a greater understanding of the range of potential climate change impacts, their regional variation and the possibility of abrupt or irreversible changes. These analyses also suggest greater damages once temperature increases become significant."

John Hemming: I should like to ask the right hon. Gentleman my usual question. If we are going to reduce carbon emissions, why do we need a constantly increasing supply of oil?

Gavin Strang: The important thing is the demand for oil. We must use less oil; that is not in dispute. Obviously, we want to use less oil, and fewer fossil fuels. I do not quite grasp the hon. Gentleman's point—

John Hemming: rose—

Gavin Strang: I am not going to give way again, because many people who have served on the Public Bill Committee want to take part in the debate. However, we are not going to stop using oil in the next few years—

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I am sorry to interrupt the right hon. Gentleman, but I must remind him that this group of amendments is to do with shipping and aviation. An opportunity for more general comments about the targets for the reduction of emissions will crop up at a later point on the Order Paper.

Gavin Strang: I am grateful to you for that advice, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

Peter Lilley: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Can you assure us that we will have an opportunity to debate the Third Reading of the Bill, and to raise the more general points that the right hon. Gentleman has tried to raise, and which many of us would like to discuss, in the course of assessing some of the new clauses, particularly in relation to their cost effectiveness?

Mr. Deputy Speaker: I think that the right hon. Gentleman knows that I cannot give any such assurance. The progress that is made on dealing with the amendments that have been selected by Mr. Speaker depends entirely on the House, so I am afraid that I cannot give any such assurance. However, I have to rule on the relevance of any remarks made to the particular group of amendments under discussion.

Gavin Strang: I am grateful, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
	The crucial issue is the global temperature rise that the world has to avoid. There, of course, international aviation and shipping are highly important. Significant observations have been made to the effect that it is not easy to deal with these issues. I was a Cabinet Minister in the Transport Department when we were elected in 1997. The big thing that I grasped very quickly was that aviation was international. It was international organisations such as IATA—the International Air Transport Association—that had to be dealt with. International shipping is, of course, also important.

John Gummer: It seems to me that the Government should be congratulated on proposing these new clauses. We Opposition Members are very pleased to support them. It also seems to me that the Government are in a difficult position. On the one hand, they cannot build into the Bill a unilateral system that might be wholly different from what emerges from negotiation. That is a perfectly reasonable Government position, but if it is to be tenable, the Government must give the House—not just now, but throughout the coming months and years—a real understanding of their commitment to doing the things that will make a reality of these new clauses.

John Hemming: rose—

John Gummer: I think I will leave the issue of oil alone, as it has been somewhat widely discussed but is not entirely germane, Mr. Deputy Speaker, to the issues that concern us at this moment.
	The Government need to give us the confidence to support them by being much tougher about what they intend to do in practical terms about these issues. First, it is obviously true that we need an internationally agreed system of measurement. In that, the Government need to be particularly attentive, so that we can all make a proper assessment of how successful we, along with other nations, are in reducing emissions.
	Secondly, it is terribly important to recognise that we cannot do these things except in common with our neighbours. I thought that the intervention on the subject of European law by my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr. Cash), who is no longer in his place, was outside the issue. If we do not do this on a European basis, there is simply no chance of doing it effectively at all. We need to recognise that the environment is not something that can be nationalised—it seems about the only thing that is not being nationalised at the moment, but it cannot be: we must do this on a European basis. It is an obvious fact of life.
	Thirdly, if we are to proceed on a wider basis, I want to underline the points raised earlier about the danger of making things worse by accident. We know of many issues at the moment—the much-vaunted efforts for biofuels in the United States, for example—that have distorted the international situation very severely indeed. We have to be very careful that we do not do the same. The problem is that, in being careful, we must not put ourselves into a position of excusing not doing anything by saying how difficult it is to do. That is the issue that I want to press on the Minister.
	If the Minister had come before the House to announce that there would be no third runway at Heathrow and that the ridiculous proposal to expand Stansted would not, in fact, go ahead, the House would have seen that the Government were doing all that they could do in advance of achieving the necessary international arrangements.

Colin Challen: Does the right hon. Gentleman also oppose the expansion of our ports and docks? I do not know whether Felixstowe has any plans to expand, but should that expansion also be stopped? We are choosing just one target, aviation, which is fair enough, but perhaps the right hon. Gentleman should extend his argument to those other areas as well.

John Gummer: I wish that the hon. Gentleman, with whom I often agree, had listened more carefully to my argument. I gave a series of examples to which the Opposition were committed. It was therefore not unreasonable for me to suggest that if the Government wished to gain the universal support that I believe will be necessary if the Bill is be effective, it would be helpful if they clarified their approach to some of the key matters that are before us. The expansion of Felixstowe, which I declare as an interest in my constituency, is not a matter before us; the matter before us is the Government's decision on Stansted, and their decision on Heathrow.
	I know very well that the Minister is not the person making the decision in this instance, and also that, if she were, she would make that decision in a way of which I would greatly approve. However, I do not consider it unreasonable for me to say to her that it is imperative that the Government take seriously some of the decisions which we understand—notwithstanding the essentially light touch of the new clause—will be translated into action.
	I want to say a little about unilateralism as it applies to aviation and shipping. It may be suggested that Britain should do nothing that might put her in a less powerful competitive position, and in general I think that that is true, but I hope the Minister will not be put off doing anything on that basis, or we shall find ourselves unable to take the lead that we have taken. The Climate Change Bill is unilateral in a very real sense, and so it should be.
	Although I cannot be accused by anyone of being unilateralist in the sense that the Minister was but—I believe—is not now, I can at least say that unilateralism, in the sense of being a step ahead of others and helping them to make their decisions, is often necessary. T.S. Eliot once said "Being a step ahead of the rest is something that deserves congratulation and you are a hero; two steps ahead, and watch out for the men in white coats." There is some truth in that. I do not want us to get into a position in which we have so damaged our international ability to trade and compete that we suffer unilaterally, but we do need to ensure that we are taking a step ahead of the rest.

Peter Lilley: Do I understand from my right hon. Friend's logic that, while there is a case for being ahead, if others do not follow us we should cease to give leadership, and that therefore a Bill that binds us unilaterally, by law, to targets 42 years ahead goes too far?

John Gummer: No, I do not agree with that. If I may say so, I think that my right hon. Friend is entirely wrong. The world is faced with the biggest threat that we have ever known about in advance, and for us not to take these measures would constitute a deep dereliction of our duty to this generation, the next generation and the generation after that.
	I must tell my right hon. Friend that I deeply disagree with the approach that if no one else helps as we go over the precipice, we had better run with them. That is a totally unacceptable position. We must stand up. That is why the Bill is so important, why the Conservative party supported it from the beginning, why it is a triumph of cross-party agreement that we have secured it, and why it is so important to tighten it up in the areas that it does not currently cover. But to do that—

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. We must not get more than two steps ahead in moving towards Third Reading.

John Gummer: With accustomed care, Mr. Deputy Speaker, you enabled me to get off my chest what I needed to, but did not allow me to proceed too far down that avenue, and I shall not do so.
	Let me return to the difference between shipping and aviation. I ask the Minister to concentrate on shipping. Shipping can provide the most carbon-efficient mechanism for transporting goods, and we therefore must take care in how we deal with it. However, it is not like aviation in a number of other ways. First, the EU trading scheme does not easily apply to shipping; it is difficult to see how we can use that as a mechanism in the same way as we can with aviation. Secondly, a great deal can be achieved in the shipping industry through taking steps that are not open to the aviation industry. For example, if it were demanded that over a short period ships increasingly used a higher quality of fuel, that could rapidly reduce the carbon impact, but that step is not open to aviation in the same way or over the same time scale.

Barry Gardiner: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. I have been listening to his comments with great care, and I agree with much of what he has said. With regard to the point he has just made, does he agree that it is important for the Government to be in deep dialogue with the International Maritime Organisation about addressing such matters? It would be helpful if the Minister were to describe the sort of discussions that she has had with the IMO.

John Gummer: The hon. Gentleman is right, and I pressed the Minister earlier about this issue, because there is a feeling abroad that we have not been sufficiently hard-working in this area and that we have failed to produce as much pressure as we should. It is thought that perhaps we should ginger up our role in international shipping, because we do not want the EU to set proper standards for the kind of fuel that is provided for, and used by, ships docking at its ports, including Felixstowe in my constituency, only to find that they therefore unload outside the EU, such as in Morocco or Turkey. We need to find ways of achieving the ends we want without producing untoward results, but that does not excuse us from being seen to be an effective pressure on the international shipping community, which in many respects wishes to be pressed and wants to move. The Government must show that they are doing that.
	My last point on this issue refers to a question raised by the hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb). He talked about the need to include shipping and aviation as a matter of equity. That may be the case, but I think there is a more important reason: if we do not have a system that covers the whole of commercial and industrial life, we will automatically create damaging kinds of discrimination and diversion. There is a commercial reason for doing this, and we ought to be citing it; otherwise, there will be untoward consequences. If we leave out shipping and aviation, not only will other areas be disproportionately affected, but if the carbon costs of imports are not included businesses that rely on imports will be able to compete disproportionately with businesses that manufacture at home.
	I do not want to be protectionist, but I do want to have equality in this commercial context, so that we ensure that the home-produced product—whether it be food, an area in which I am particularly interested, or manufactured goods—is not disproportionately affected because those businesses are paying the cost of the carbon that they use, whereas other businesses are not paying the cost of the carbon that is used when their product is flown or shipped in from a far-away country. I therefore beg the Minister to take seriously the point that this is not only a matter of theoretical equality, much as I believe in that as an issue. It is a matter of commercial justice and a crucial one for an island that has lost much of its manufacturing ability and ought to gain much back.

Andrew Tyrie: My right hon. Friend has just put forward a very good case against unilateralism in shipping and aviation, as those industries would be adversely affected by it. I cannot understand why he feels that those industries should be protected from unilateralism but other parts of industry should not be protected from it elsewhere in the Bill.

John Gummer: I have obviously not made myself very clear to my hon. Friend. I was making the point that if we do not include those two industries in the Bill there will be untoward results because they are excluded. In fact, I was making the opposite argument.
	My hon. Friend is a doubter about whether we should be doing all this at all, and the reason for his doubt is that he has not committed himself to the scientific view of the damage that climate change is likely to bring and the fact that human beings are causing it. I understand that someone who takes that view can argue that we really ought to sit back and wait for someone else to do something, because it does not matter anyway. In my view, which is based on the scientific advice, it matters desperately and may matter much more than we think.
	We therefore have to act rapidly and achieve a delicate and difficult balance by acting sufficiently unilaterally to lead but not going so far as to make it difficult for others to follow by giving them an advantage that they do not want to give up. It is quite a delicate step, and the Government are trying to do that. We as an Opposition have a duty to support them in so far as they are, and they ought to give us a bit more help in supporting them by making clear what they are doing practically to make the amendments a reality.

Nia Griffith: I welcome new clause 15 and pay tribute to the work of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, East and Saddleworth (Mr. Woolas) not only on the Bill but on raising the issue of aviation and shipping on the international stage. We all know that that is where it has to be raised.
	We recognise the need to count in the emissions from aviation and shipping, but we all accept that calculating how to apportion them to individual countries is fraught with difficulty. As our Climate Change Bill is often referred to as a world first, it is crucial that we include aviation and shipping. We do not want to give other people the idea that those matters can be left out of legislation. They should be included because we need to raise consciousness among many other nations that may follow suit by producing similar legislation. However, we realise that there is still an enormous amount of work to be done to reach an international agreement about how any mechanism might work, and we still need to work hard on the international stage in many other spheres. We all recognise that what we do here can be worth while only if it is mirrored elsewhere in the world.
	We certainly might be able to use a system involving sectoral emissions, but we must remember that one problem with the EU emissions trading system is that we sometimes lose manufacturing industry from this country because it relocates to a country where the emissions trading scheme does not require it to meet our standards. We may find that, in the aviation and shipping industries, transport routes and refuelling stops become much more about avoiding the emissions being counted than about producing the lowest possible emissions.
	Our Bill is also important because we do not see it merely as a legal sanction. Once we have exceeded targets, it is too late—those emissions are out there and causing damage. We should see the Bill as an important monitoring tool and as a process rather than as an end in itself.

John Hemming: Will the hon. Lady give way?

Nia Griffith: I shall give way, but if the matter is about oil, I suspect that you would prefer me not to refer to it at this stage, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

John Hemming: I find it somewhat confusing when we talk about shipping emissions. A significant point about shipping is that the consumption of energy is linked to the fourth power of the velocity, which is an important reason why it is possible to reduce shipping emissions. However, all these things are powered by oil. If we do not take any view about whether we need a constant supply of oil, there will be a problem.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Lady was prescient. Obviously, we want to have a good debate, but we have a formidable Order Paper before us and we need also to make reasonable progress.

Nia Griffith: This issue is about counting and monitoring, which is why it is important that we include mechanisms in the Bill such as making provision on advice and listening to the Committee on Climate Change. Those are the tools that we are using. The monitoring and reporting processes, and the targets that we put in place, will make us think about how we achieve the necessary reductions in emissions and how we create a low-carbon economy.
	Motor manufacturers came to the Joint Committee on the draft Climate Change Bill saying, "You tell us what we have to do and when we have to do it by, and we will need to take decisive actions." The same applies in respect of aviation and shipping; they need to be included in international debate, because we need to set the parameters on an international scale. If enough of the powerful economies say that ships can come to their countries only if they meet X, Y and Z conditions, a sea change—if I may say that—will begin to take place in how boats and ships are fuelled.

Rob Marris: We are about a quarter of the way into the period from 1990—the base year—to 2050. In the first 15 years of that period, the UK cut its CO2 emissions by 6.4 per cent. Does my hon. Friend think that we can include aviation and shipping and make 80 per cent. cuts by 2050, or does she think that that is fantasy politics?

Nia Griffith: I think that we need the mechanism of the Bill in order to give us determination. My hon. Friend rightly points out that we have so far lagged behind in making ourselves take the action that will produce the emissions cuts that we all want, and that is the area in which we must move forward. As I say, we cannot make progress on this issue simply on a national basis, but it is important that new clause 15 is included in the Bill to send a clear message to the rest of the world. We will have to continue to use it as a tool both internally in the UK and in our external negotiations. That is why it is important that the wording of new clause 15 not only gives us a certain flexibility, but sets out clearly that aviation and shipping must form part of the advice that we must take in order to move forward and choose what we are going to do to reduce our emissions and meet targets, rather than exceed them.

Tim Yeo: I declare an interest that is in the register: I am a director of Eurotunnel, which provides a low-carbon transport route between Britain and the continent.
	I warmly welcome the Government new clauses that we are debating and the Government's acceptance of amendment No. 72, just as I welcomed the Bill on Second Reading in the summer. The Minister knows that, like me, the Environmental Audit Committee, which I chair, would much prefer the Government to go further and faster in relation to both aviation and shipping. I particularly hope that the Government will be—or will continue to be—in the forefront of efforts to bring aviation into the European Union emissions trading scheme on a basis that really drives carbon prices to a level that will incentivise investment in low-carbon infrastructure, encourage the faster introduction of more efficient aircraft and accelerate the use of more efficient practices by airlines as they move planes both on the ground and in the air. Those benefits could flow quite quickly, but they will do so only if the terms for the introduction of aviation into the scheme are a great deal better than those that applied in phase 1 for the power generation industry.

Joan Ruddock: indicated assent.

Tim Yeo: I am glad to see the Minister nodding her assent. As I mentioned in my intervention, I also hope that the Government will lead the debate on how to accelerate a switch by the shipping industry to some of the more efficient, less polluting and more low-carbon methods referred to by my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer). Britain is a great maritime nation, and the shipping industry would respond to a lead from the Government on these matters. Indeed, the industry is looking for a lead, and the evidence given to my Committee this morning suggested that while it is not very concerned about the precise policies, it would like to know how the Government intend to accelerate those changes.
	I also urge the Government to consider what more can be done to speed up a switch from domestic flights to lower carbon alternatives. There is a strong probability that those countries that have a low-carbon transport infrastructure, such as France has, and that Spain and others are rapidly developing through their high-speed rail networks, will enjoy a huge economic and commercial advantage in 10 or 15 years. Because those projects take a long time to build, it will be too late for us if we wake up in 2020 and wish that we had implemented our own when we first realised that it was important.
	Many of the supporters of the Bill and the Government's approach are dismayed that other parts of the Government appear to be moving in the opposite direction. Reference has already been made to Heathrow, but I wish to refer to Stansted, an issue in which you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, may have a passing interest. Only two weeks ago, the Government approved a substantial increase in the number of flights from Stansted. That was an environmentally catastrophic decision for my constituents in South Suffolk, for people in East Anglia and for Britain. It was taken at a time when usage of Stansted is falling—the figures for 2008 are lower than those for 2007—so there was no reason for that decision. There was no pressure to make it, especially as the low-cost airlines that dominate the airport are experiencing a drastic change to their business prospects and business model.
	The replacement of domestic flights with low-carbon alternative transport choices would not harm Britain's competitive position internationally; in many respects, it would help it. For example, it would free slots at Heathrow for the introduction of strategically important long-haul international routes. While I welcome the Government's fresh approach on aviation as reflected in the Bill, the amendments and the Minister's remarks, I urge them to be bolder. In particular, I hope that the Minister and the new Department—I wish it a successful future—will bring colleagues in the Department for Transport into line.

David Chaytor: I congratulate my hon. Friend the Minister and her former ministerial colleagues on steering the Bill so successfully through Committee and, in particular, on listening carefully to the various representations made over many months, especially on aviation and shipping, as well as on the overall target for 2050.
	I am struggling to understand how the hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) can believe that new clause 14 is significantly different from the proposals in Government new clause 15, with the addition of amendment No. 72. I support amendments Nos. 68 and 69, but in the absence of my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, South (Nigel Griffiths), I am happy that they should be superseded by amendment No. 72. I urge all Members to consider the context of amendment No. 72, because it would simply add aviation and shipping to those matters that must be taken into account by the Secretary of State and the Committee on Climate Change, which include
	"scientific knowledge about climate change...technology relevant to climate change ... economic circumstances ... fiscal circumstances ... social circumstances...energy policy ... circumstances at European and international level."
	Logically, if the hon. Gentleman seeks to suggest that Government new clause 15 and amendment No. 72 are inadequate, he should table additional amendments that spell out how the references to all the other items in clause 10(2) are inadequate, but he is not doing that.
	There are uncertainties about the method of calculating emissions from aviation and shipping. There are uncertainties about the method of assigning the emissions to different nation states. There is always the question of a future Government who do not have the same determination as this Government to reduce UK emissions. Although I accept those points, I cannot see the purpose of new clause 14. I fear that although we have successfully built up impressive cross-party consensus over many months, there is a bit of game playing going on as we reach the end point. That is regrettable.

Steve Webb: Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that Government new clause 15 is entirely about a duty on the Climate Change Committee to give advice? The only duty placed on the Secretary of State is to publish that advice. Amendment No. 72, as redrafted, puts in place another thing to which the Climate Change Committee must have regard. The duty that we have proposed in new clause 14 is a duty on the Secretary of State with regard to carbon emissions, while amendment No. 3 gets rid of an opt-out for the Secretary of State. It is not taking anything away from the cross-party consensus, but going further and trying to oblige the Secretary of State to do something.

David Chaytor: I do not agree. Clause 10 is very specific when it states:
	"The following matters must be taken into account"
	both
	"by the Secretary of State ... and ... by the Committee on Climate Change".
	There is hardly any difference. There is a difference between the wording used in new clause 15 and amendment No. 72 and that used in new clause 14, and that is why I urge the House to reject any attempt to move to a vote on new clause 14.
	I want to endorse the comments made by the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer), who pointed out that in environmental policy, above all, we need a Government who are open, outward-looking and prepared to engage with the international community. Of course, my right hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley) pointed out earlier that aviation's inclusion in the EU emissions trading scheme was carried out under the UK presidency. Will the Minister say whether she thinks that that would have happened if the Government had had an irrational, obsessive Eurosceptic policy?
	As we move towards further negotiations on the precise methodology for including emissions from aviation and shipping, are we more or less likely to reach agreement with other nation states with a Government who are open, outward-looking, prepared to negotiate and positive about their membership of the EU or with a future Government less enthusiastic about the EU and determined to refuse to co-operate with the other member states? It is self-evident that the likelihood of any change of Government in the future is linked to that. The shadow spokesman, who is not in his place, worked himself up into a frenzy of excitement about the prospect of an incoming Conservative Government, but the likelihood of that happening is in inverse proportion to the continuation of the Opposition's irrational, obsessive hostility towards the EU and international co-operation more generally.

Peter Lilley: I draw the House's attention to my declaration in the Register of Members' Interests.
	In the speeches of a number of hon. Members, it has been assumed that the whole House is unanimous on the measures before us, and on the Bill that they amend or add to. Historically, the House has made its worst mistakes not when it is divided, but when it is virtually unanimous; not when it is adversarial, but when MPs switch off their critical faculties in a spasm of moral self-congratulation. My concern is that, in considering these measures, we are displaying that tendency. It is vital that we bring the House back down to earth by considering the hard costs and benefits of, and alternatives to, what is proposed and what we are doing. We have not done that very much so far in the debates in the House. Only once in Committee was mention made of the costs and benefits of what we are proposing.

Elliot Morley: The right hon. Gentleman will find that, apart from the Stern report, which addressed the issue of costs and benefits, the report by Lord Turner specifically identified some of the projected costs for his recommendations, which are now being incorporated in the Bill. They were relatively modest.

Peter Lilley: I am not in any way disputing what the hon. Gentleman says, but no hon. Members, in either the House or Committee, have addressed the question of costs and benefits. They could have done so, as the Government have produced an impact assessment spelling out their estimate of the costs and benefits involved. Those figures are all we have when it comes to trying to assess the costs and benefits of the specific clauses and amendments before us.
	The Government's impact assessment has three very important implications. The first is that the costs of the Bill as a whole are potentially huge, and they will be even more onerous if these proposals are accepted. The impact assessment puts the transitional costs at between 1.3 and 2 per cent. of gross domestic product up to 2020. In addition, there will be competitive costs to this country as a result of industry being driven overseas, even though that will not reduce the level of carbon emissions. Ignoring both those costs and making the heroic assumption that British industry can instantly and perfectly implement the latest and most cost-effective technology to meet the targets, means that the estimated cost of the Bill as a whole—even before the target for emission reductions is increased from 60 per cent. to 80 per cent.—comes to £205 billion.
	That is a lot of money. We have to ask whether we are prepared to increase it by including aviation and shipping, as the measures before us propose. I do not know whether hon. Members have consulted their constituents, but £205 billion would equal over £10,000 from every family in every constituency.
	People are used to hearing about the large sums of money being used to rescue the banks, but that has been in the form of loans that one hopes ultimately will be repaid. The costs that we are incurring through the amendments—and by the Bill even if it remains unamended—are real money. Our constituents will cough up that £10,000 in taxes and lost incomes, and never see it again. Before we add even more onerous burdens by including aviation and shipping in the Bill, we must be very sure that we are happy with the costs that we are already incurring.
	Secondly, we need to look at the benefits, which the impact assessment also considers. Although it shows that the maximum costs, even excluding all the things proposed in the measures before us, are potentially £205 billion, the striking thing is that it puts the maximum benefits of the actions proposed in the Bill at £110 billion, or just over half that total. Do the authors of the new proposals believe that their costs will eventually exceed their benefits, as is the case with the Bill as a whole, or can they reassure us that the benefits will be greater than the costs?

Christopher Chope: Will my right hon. Friend give way?

Colin Challen: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Peter Lilley: I will give way in a moment, and especially to the hon. Member for Morley and Rothwell (Colin Challen).
	I have reservations about the certainty with which some people adopt the scientific case behind global alarmism, but I am equally uncertain that it is necessarily wrong, so I am quite prepared to take out an insurance policy against the possibility that we will face global warming, just as I insure my house against the possibility of fire. However, I ask the House whether it is sensible to buy an insurance policy whose premiums could be twice the value of one's house—

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The right hon. Gentleman is an experienced and skilful debater in this House, but I think that he must realise himself that he is building a broad case on a narrow foundation. The remarks that he is making are, in terms of good order and debate, more strictly applicable to later parts of the Bill, and particularly to Third Reading. Therefore, I really must direct him to the specific matter covered in this group of new clauses and amendments.

Peter Lilley: Of course I take your remarks to heart, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
	We have to remember the normal laws of declining marginal benefit and increasing marginal cost. If we tighten the Bill by adding more rigorous burdens regarding aviation and shipping, we must expect the costs to be higher than the costs of meeting the 60 per cent. target, let alone the 80 per cent. target, and we must expect the benefits to be less than the marginal benefits that were to be accrued.

David Howarth: The right hon. Gentleman will of course be aware of the work that Professor Barker did with Pan, Köhler, Warren and Winne, published in 2006 in  The Energy Journal, which showed that as the targets become stricter, the world growth rate increases because of induced technological change. Economics has moved on slightly since he was at Cambridge.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. Oh, dear. The hon. Gentleman is enticing the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) towards the wider aspects of the Bill again. I must remind the House that we want to make progress on to other matters, and we should therefore stick strictly to the terms of the amendments before us.

Peter Lilley: I will do just that and avoid discussing with the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) my experience of Cambridge, which was splendid. I instead return to the measure before us, which asks the Committee on Climate Change to assess the cost of including aviation and shipping in the Bill. However, the new clause does not say how those assessments are to be made. We must assume that they are to be made on the basis that Lord Stern used to assess the costs and benefits in the report to which the right hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley) referred, or on the basis used in the impact assessment that the Government put before the House, although that assessment refuses to give us any costings specifically on aviation and shipping.
	It is interesting that the impact assessment totally contradicts Lord Stern, who said that the costs of the measure, including aviation, would be far short of the benefits. Of course, he reached that conclusion only by discounting the future at such a low rate that the benefits exceeded the costs. According to Nordhaus, the leading valuator of this sort of methodology, half the benefits that Sir Nicholas Stern takes into account will not accrue until after the year 2800, but so low is his discount rate that they outweigh the costs that we will incur in this century.
	More sensibly, the Government rejected that. I asked them what interest rate they think should be used, and presumably want to use, in the assessments that they require in new clause 15. They say that they are using the traditional, conventional discount rate required by the Treasury of 3.5 per cent. in real terms. That is why their calculations show that the costs are not necessarily much lower than the benefits, and could well be twice as great as the benefits. Presumably, if the Committee follows the Government's methodology, it could reach the same conclusion for aviation and shipping.

Rob Marris: rose—

Peter Lilley: I give way to the hon. Gentleman, who made by far the best speech on Second Reading.

Rob Marris: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. Like other industries, aviation and shipping are, of course, susceptible to technological change. On the £205 billion cost—that is the upper end; the lower end is £30 billion—may I point out that the impact assessment said:
	"Upper end of the range assumes no technological change"?
	There may well be technological change in aviation and shipping. Conversely, on the benefits, which are between £82 billion and £110 billion, the impact assessment says:
	"Benefits are therefore likely to be higher."
	I suggest that the right hon. Gentleman is being a little pessimistic about aviation and shipping, and about the cost-benefit analysis.

Peter Lilley: I may be wrong, of course, but I am using the Government's figures. Throughout the debate no one else has bothered even to mention the Government's figures, and they were mentioned only once in Committee. It is only sensible that we should do so, and if we do, and if in particular we reach the conclusion that they should use the methodology implied in the impact assessment and not the absurd methods used by Sir Nicholas Stern, now Lord Stern—he received his reward—they would reach a conclusion very similar to that advocated by the hon. Gentleman on Second Reading: that we should put far more emphasis on adaptation to helping poor countries cope with climate change, rather than on crippling our industries—aviation, shipping and all the other industries—to little avail.

Andrew Tyrie: rose—

Peter Lilley: I give way to my hon. Friend, who made the equal best speech on Second Reading.

Andrew Tyrie: I hope that my right hon. Friend has not devalued the compliment that he threw across the Floor of the House; heaven knows what he will say when another Member seeks to intervene.
	The question at issue has been whether technology in aviation and shipping can proceed at a pace to enable the costs to be kept reasonably low and therefore to allow us to pick up the benefits of a low carbon technology without extra cost. Is my right hon. Friend aware that the leading estimates of the improvement needed in carbon productivity are that it needs to increase fourfold over the next 40 years—that is, that the average of the past 15 years, which is 1.5 per cent. per annum, needs to increase to about 6 per cent. per annum if we are to get anywhere near meeting the 80 per cent. target? Will he speculate on whether it is plausible that a fourfold increase can be achieved?

Peter Lilley: That would be extremely demanding, but the implications of the Government's impact assessment both for aviation and shipping and for industries more generally is that we must find more effective ways of reducing costs and carbon utilisation than they themselves think are available or would result from the measures in the Bill.
	Either that, or we must adopt the route proposed by the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris) and devote more effort to adaptation to climate change rather than mitigation, which would remove the burden—the almost impossible task—of bringing aviation and shipping into the scheme. It would also mean that, if global warming continues but turns out not to be predominantly the result of human activity, we would still be able to help the people in poor countries who would suffer from it, whereas we would not help them if we relied only on mitigation efforts.
	The implications of the clauses before us are extremely serious. We are potentially asking our constituents to bear a burden of £10,000 for every household, should we increase it. We are potentially producing benefits that may be only half the costs that we are incurring. We have been using a method to assess future costs and benefits that has been surreptitiously abandoned by the Government, but they have told us nothing about it. These issues ought to be discussed more fully before the Bill becomes law, and it is a sad day when Parliament refuses to face up to these hard facts.

Alan Simpson: There is a real danger of the House misleading itself into debates which, although important, are not the debates that should be taking place on the amendments. There are issues to be addressed concerning the methodology of impact assessments, but at this stage the House is being asked to address the principle of the inclusion of the Government's assessment of carbon impacts in the way in which we set our carbon budgets. It is important to bring the debate back to that.
	It is also important not to allow ourselves to conduct a caricature debate about the choices that we face. The choices are not between unilateralism or multilateralism, or between mitigation or adaptation. We will have to do both. When the ship is sinking, the last thing we want to hear is someone running round the decks saying, "No action until there is a global refit." If the ship is sinking, we want action taken on the threat that we face at that time.
	What we need to recognise from the scientific reports, which have been coming to us in their own tsunamis, is that the climate and the planet are the part of the equation that is in the process of taking the most enormous unilateral action. We will have to address huge upheavals in the whole framework of how we consider societies and economies capable of working viably throughout the whole of this century.
	I had hoped that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming) would be here for his customary intervention on this issue. The answer to the question about oil is that by the time we come out of the current global financial crisis, two things will be queuing up. The first will be the climate crises already in the pipeline. Secondly, by that time we will probably have passed the peak oil level anyway, and we will have to move to a post-oil economy if we want a viable economy of any sort.
	The question before the House is whether it is right in principle to include aviation and shipping in how we assess carbon impact. The answer is that it has to be right. It would be absurd for the House to pretend that we can ignore the impact that aviation in particular, and shipping, have on our carbon emissions and the climate damage that we do. The right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) is right to say that there are domestic implications that need to feed back into our policy on airport expansion. It would be enormously sensible to draw airport expansion to a halt; that would give a hugely important signal to people in this country and internationally about the importance that we place on the environment being the centrepiece of any sustainable economy in the 21st century.

Graham Stuart: I agree with the hon. Gentleman; it makes no logical sense for shipping and aviation to be excluded. They should be included. Amendment No. 72 says that consideration should be given to
	"the emissions...that the Secretary of State expects to arise during the budget period."
	However, the Minister seemed earlier to suggest—perhaps I misunderstood her—that the Government would refuse to produce any numbers on the emissions that they expected to arise from aviation and shipping.

Alan Simpson: I understood that the Minister said that she would produce the assessments for the period of the Parliament, but that there was no point in coming back with annual statements when those would be set out in the overall assessment. In so far as we can predict across the period of a whole Parliament, that is the sensible way for the issue to be incorporated.
	I want the Liberal Democrats to think carefully about whether we need to divide on new clause 14. When I consider amendment No. 72, the Government's comments about its incorporation into the framework of the Bill and what the Bill says, I think that there is a real danger that we would be dividing about how many angels there are on the head of a pin. I find comfort not in clause 10, but in clause 9, which sets out a duty for the Secretary of State to
	"publish a statement setting out whether and how the order",
	which has to be brought before Parliament,
	"takes account of any representations made by the other national authorities."
	In so far as there is a direct transfer from aviation and shipping to other sectors of the economy, I cannot conceive of a situation in which those sectors do not make their own representations about the distorting effects of their being asked to carry the carbon consequences of existing policies on aviation and shipping.
	The cross-party agreement that seems to have emerged gives everything that the Liberal Democrat new clause seeks to deliver. There are issues on which it is important for the House to divide, but we owe ourselves the discipline of not pretending, for narrow advantage, that there is a real division among the different parties, and that a real gain can be made from a Division when it cannot. I hope that the Liberal Democrats will have another look at the amendments and the clauses that were initially in the Bill, because I doubt whether they could find any way in which new clause 14 would change anything.

William McCrea: My hon. Friends and I accept that climate change is a serious environmental threat that requires action. We have to tackle carbon emissions, and it is therefore important that there is an appropriate Bill to do that. Although I have a very sceptical colleague sitting beside me, our party's policy is that the Bill is necessary. However, I do not accept that we can say with authority that man is the sole contributor to the situation. There are those who have over-egged the case and in many ways destroyed the argument, and that has made many people in the community cynical. There are also those who have underestimated the case, and they have not helped the debate either. I believe that global warming is a reality. Scientists have a certain view of the issue; in this House we need to take a balanced view.
	I should like to draw to the Minister's attention some consequences of these proposals, particularly in the region of the United Kingdom that I come from, Northern Ireland. It is essential to deal with this issue internationally and even-handedly, in conjunction with our European Union partners. It is accepted in Northern Ireland that those who call themselves great Europeans have a wonderful way of taking European legislation and, if it suits them, driving a coach and horses through it and not carrying out what was intended. In the UK—although many see us as bad Europeans in many ways—the Government gold-plate legislation with great zeal and force it on the people.
	There needs to be equity in the provisions made across Europe. There is a case for commercial justice in relation to aviation—in my constituency, for example. I have in my constituency an international airport, Belfast International, which is in direct competition with another international airport that is not many miles away, but happens to be in another EU country. Unlike many other EU countries, we have a land border. I ask the Minister to consider carefully the danger that if we take action unilaterally, rather than right across Europe, we could be on the verge of driving local industry over that border. That would penalise my constituents and my local airport. It is not the business of this United Kingdom Government to penalise their British citizens in Northern Ireland or to direct business to our competitors. There is a genuine fear that there will be discrimination against a region of the UK as regards the aviation industry. I do not believe that the Government intend that to be the outcome of their actions, but it could be, if they do not ensure that there is a balanced and equitable approach across Europe.
	I know that an easy, throwaway statement can be made about transport alternatives and so on. In Northern Ireland, over many years, the trains were removed—most of Northern Ireland is not served by train—and the timing, frequency and availability of buses is not as in other regions of the United Kingdom. If we take people out of cars to deal with the issue, what will they use? A horse and trap? Bicycles? We have to deal with reality, rather than go back into history.
	We have to have a balanced view. I appeal to the Minister concerning aviation and how it relates to the competition faced by the international airport in my constituency, lest we destroy a vital part of our industry, and direct industry away from a region of the United Kingdom. That would not be good for the future of the UK or its industrial prosperity.

Nick Hurd: I rise to give a cautious welcome to the movement by the Government on this important issue, but we must recognise the scale of the journey. We have moved from a situation, in summer 2007, when those of us on the Joint Committee on the draft Bill were listening to a Government who were saying, "We are filing the inclusion of aviation in the 'too difficult' box. We don't need to do it because we aren't required to by our international agreements." The message from the Government in the Bill is now, "We'll tell you if we're going to include aviation and shipping in our international targets by the end of 2012, and if we do it, we'll tell you then how we're going to do it. On the way we'll get some advice from the Committee on Climate Change and publish some projections." The hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) was right: there is no absolute obligation on the Government to include aviation and shipping in the carbon budgets or the targets, and we should be quite clear about that.
	It has been a modest journey, but a welcome one. That is why the Bill needs toughening, and I extend a cautious welcome to amendment No. 72, tabled by the right hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley), who, sadly, is no longer in his place. It adds value by requiring the Government and the Committee on Climate Change to take into account aviation and shipping in their public deliberations. I am concerned that the phrase "take into account" is too vague, because it can mean anything to any Government—but there has been an improvement.
	We recognise that there are tremendous difficulties in calculation—we have to respect that, and we must not get too far ahead of ourselves in the international process. But this Climate Change Bill is very important. It is a landmark Bill, which sets an international lead as a framework Bill. That is its value. It is a new method of setting targets and monitoring progress against targets. The key innovation in the Bill is not the long-term targets, but the carbon budgets. The rolling carbon budgets will allow us to get a grip on the problem of cumulative carbon emissions—a point forcefully made by my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart). It is the cumulative carbon emissions that count, not the absolute carbon emissions at the distant date of 2050.
	The carbon budgets are the key innovation, and we simply cannot undermine them by leaving completely to one side the fastest growing source of emissions, however difficult it is to calculate them. We should take the opportunity to place on record the fact that aviation emissions in the UK grew by 90 per cent. between 1990 and 2004. The Under-Secretary was unable to answer the question posed by my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness about the proportion of future emissions in the carbon budget that the Government think will come from aviation, but she will be aware that there are various estimates from serious people such as the Tyndall Centre and WWF, and the range of projections is between 50 per cent. and 100 per cent. of our carbon budget in 2050. We have to address a serious engine of growth in carbon emissions, and we cannot afford the "out of sight, out of mind" message that we received from the Government 18 months ago.
	As the Under-Secretary well knows, transport, and aviation in particular, is the most difficult in policy terms, partly because there is no obvious short-term technology solution. It does not take much for us to imagine that our children or grandchildren will be driving around in cars that are different from the ones that we drive. We can almost feel the technology—it is out there. But in aviation that is not the case. The best-case scenarios for aviation are for technology products leading to improvements of about 1.5 per cent. a year, which is not enough, given the demand. We are left in very difficult political territory when making policy—having to decide whether we want to manage demand through price mechanisms, taxes or the management of airport capacity.
	The Government are placing all their bets on the European emissions trading scheme—the cap-and-trade scheme. That make me nervous, because in the Environmental Audit Committee we spend a lot of time looking at the emissions trading scheme. It works as a testing mechanism, but it has comprehensively failed to reduce emissions, because a cap-and-trade scheme is only as good as the cap, which is a function of political will. The great concern is whether there will be the political will in 2011, in the face of the mother of all lobbies from the aviation industry, to set a cap that bites. We know that such a cap will have significant implications for the price that consumers will pay for aviation. There will be significant consequences for the price of carbon credits in the system for other industries. This is an extremely difficult policy area.

Barry Gardiner: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it would be possible to allow an expansion of the aviation industry, and shipping as well, as long as that was taken into account in the carbon budget, as he rightly stressed, with accommodations and increased cuts in those areas? That would, critically, demand that it be possible to quantify exactly what the amount of the contribution was—the central point made by the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) earlier.

Nick Hurd: Absolutely—we need to know what we are dealing with. The hon. Gentleman has painted a gentle and attractive scenario, but it places a lot of faith in the emissions trading system, which is attractive in theory but has not worked in practice, because too much political risk is tied up in it.
	I was making the point that we cannot afford an "out of sight, out of mind" attitude to aviation and shipping, because the policy challenge is too great. It requires the Government of the day to get a grip on it, and the harsh reality is that this Government have been extremely clumsy in the signals that they have sent through their policies on aviation. We had a clumsy increase in air passenger duty, which gave green taxes a bad name because it was closely associated with the concept of stealth taxes. We seem to be slow-marching towards the wrong decision on Heathrow. It was desperately disappointing that one of the first signals from a new Secretary of State in a new Department was simply to confirm that existing position on Heathrow. The Under-Secretary will be aware that it is hard to persuade those in this country, let alone any other, that we are serious about controlling emissions from aviation if we give the green light to the expansion of the fastest-growing source of emissions. The negative value of that decision far outweighs the relatively small value of the signals being sent in the Bill.

Graham Stuart: This is a question not only of aviation but of shipping. We are a major maritime nation, but little effort has been made here, or globally, into finding out what the emissions from shipping are, let alone into the investment and leadership that Ministers like to talk about that is needed to transform the efficiency of shipping in terms of emissions. That is a very challenging process in aviation, but probably a lot less so in shipping. However, precious little effort or political will has been applied to that area so far.

Nick Hurd: I accept that point completely. It is coming through in all the evidence received by the Environmental Audit Committee at the moment. The value of the debates on the amendments is to ensure that such matters are included in the Bill, so that the Government cannot ignore the issue.

John Hemming: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Nick Hurd: If it is about oil, the answer is no.

John Hemming: It is about shipping.

Nick Hurd: All right.

John Hemming: Does the hon. Gentleman accept that shipping is one of the modes of transport that, historically, operated without any carbon emissions?

Nick Hurd: I congratulate the Government on moving from an unsustainable position on the inclusion of aviation and shipping in our consideration of budgets and targets—but I say to the Under-Secretary that the most powerful signal they could send would be to review and reverse the decision on Heathrow.

Charles Walker: I am glad that we are debating the inclusion of aviation and shipping in the Bill; such matters need to be aired and discussed in Parliament. Setting a reduction target of 80 per cent. by 2050 is laudable and ambitious, but probably unachievable. In the next 42 years we will return to this place regularly to recalibrate the target—to reduce it to take into account global recession and the need to create jobs and wealth.
	The danger of setting a target of 80 per cent. is that it will become just another missed target. My word, we have had a lot of missed targets in the past 10 years. There is a danger that our constituents will perceive politicians perpetrating another con trick by setting a target that there is little—if any—hope of achieving. Let us be honest with the electorate and say that in an ideal world, we would like a carbon-neutral economy by 2050—zero carbon emissions—but it simply will not happen, because we do not live in an ideal world. What we should say is that in the next 42 years we will rightly reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, but do it sensibly, and that we will progress towards reducing carbon emissions, but not set artificial targets, which we realise—probably secretly—that we have little chance of achieving. We need to be honest with the electorate, and I do not believe that we are doing that.

Christopher Chope: In a sense, it is a pity that today's business is not subject to any knives, because that means that we are unlikely to reach all the items on our agenda, and there are some important issues to debate later. I shall therefore keep my remarks brief.
	The issue that we are discussing needs to be put into context. A paper that PricewaterhouseCoopers produced, entitled "The world in 2050", projects that the United Kingdom will produce only 1.2 per cent. of global emissions in 2050—without the increased targets in the Bill and without including emissions from shipping and aviation. We must take that into consideration. Even if we eliminated that 1.2 per cent., would it make any difference to the world? I do not think that it would—indeed, the burdens on our economy would be even more enormous than they are already likely to be, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) explained so well.
	My right hon. Friend was one of five who voted against Second Reading. When the history books are written in 2050, people will ask why only five people voted against Second Reading of a ludicrous measure. However, he failed to say that, as we export more of our manufacturing industry, we will depend all the more on international shipping and aviation for our imports. The new clauses therefore deal with matters that are highly relevant to our viability as a nation.
	The TaxPayers Alliance produced an important research note, which shows that, if we achieved an 80 per cent. reduction in emissions, UK gross domestic product in 2050 would have to be 3.8 per cent. lower than it was in 1990. We know of the public dismay and, indeed, even the Prime Minister's concern, about the fact that we have now entered the first quarter of negative growth since 2007. What would 3.8 per cent. negative growth in 2050 compared with 1990 mean for the people of this country? It would be a disaster on a massive scale and unacceptable to the people. Not enough has been done to spell out the implications of the Bill.
	As one examines the measure, one realises that it contains all sorts of loopholes. It would therefore be possible for successor Governments—or even the current Government—to adjust the membership of the committee that is meant to be pushing all of this so that it was then able to use the word "appropriate" to decide that the provisions passed in the Bill were wholly inappropriate as our economy went down the global league table.

Sammy Wilson: I appreciate the hon. Gentleman's point that targets set for a time when most of us will not be in the House—and perhaps not on the planet—are all very well. However, even if the Government reduced or amended the targets, the Bill contains costs now that would hit our constituents hard in fuel, food and travel bills. We should be worrying about that.

Christopher Chope: I agree, but I shall concentrate on aviation, aerospace manufacturing and shipping because they are key industries in our country. One could argue that the City of London is the centre of global shipping activity. We have some of the world's largest hub airports, and also international shipping container terminals, albeit not so many as we had, which is a pity. Aviation is our heritage, but I have not heard a word to show that the promoters of the Bill and the supporters of the amendments support and laud British aviation and shipping.

Colin Challen: Would the hon. Gentleman therefore argue that people such as Richard Branson should not try to reinvest all Virgin Atlantic's profits in exploring the possibilities of biofuels? If it were a bit more expensive to develop that new technology, would not some sort of statutory framework, which encouraged people, help those who wanted to do that?

Christopher Chope: I could not agree less. Richard Branson's success is based on being a buccaneer and an entrepreneur and not taking any notice of regulations and Governments. He occasionally may cosy up to the current Government, but when he realises what is involved, he gets away pretty quickly. The hon. Gentleman has deployed an argument that supports my case. Let us have free trade, the market and competition.
	Global trade depends, above all, on aviation and shipping. It would not get far without them. I want global trade to grow, but it is not clear whether the Bill's promoters and the amendments' supporters share that objective. How do the Government propose to reduce emissions from aviation and shipping without damaging global trade? It is obviously common sense to say that fuel expenditure could be reduced for each unit of aviation and shipping activity, and that each unit could be more fuel efficient, but the market will achieve that objective—we do not need regulation to do it. I am worried that an agenda for imposing volume reductions in aviation and shipping underlies the Bill and the amendments. Imposing such volume reductions would be damaging to global trade. We are a global trading nation and it would therefore be highly damaging to the United Kingdom plc.

Rob Marris: The right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) kindly praised me in his interesting remarks. He may have misinterpreted my position slightly because I believe that the United Kingdom and the world need to opt for adaptation, about which I have been banging on in the House for more than two years, initially as a lone voice. However, we also need to lessen emissions because I have no doubt that human activity contributes significantly to adverse climate change. I have been seized of that notion for the past 35 years, since I studied it at university, and I am not a scientist—the science has been around for a long time. Of course, just because it has been around for a long time does not mean that it is right.

Sammy Wilson: The hon. Gentleman says that he has been seized of the idea for the past 35 years, but 35 years ago, some of the people who now talk about man-made global warming were talking about man-made global cooling and an ice age. If the hon. Gentleman was seized of the idea in the 1970s, he was well ahead of those who now advocate the notion of global warming.

Rob Marris: I am slightly saddened that the Minister of Environment in the Northern Ireland Assembly is apparently more than 35 years behind me. That troubles me, but I will go no further into that.
	I welcome Government new clause 15 and amendment No. 72, which will mean that the Bill includes emissions from aviation and shipping. That is right, but I want to counterpoise that with the 80 per cent. cut by 2050. The right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) was absolutely right when he cited T. S. Eliot, rather than George Eliot, on being two steps ahead. If we as politicians are one step ahead of the electorate, that is leadership. If we are two steps ahead, that is eccentricity. If we regard the inclusion of aviation and shipping as one step in that paradigm, the second step is the 80 per cent. cut.
	Trying to do both is unrealistic. Probably for the first and only time ever, I agreed with a great deal of what the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker) said. Government amendment No. 1, to which we shall come later, talks about the 80 per cent. cut. We are talking about aviation and shipping, but one has to counterpoise them, because we cannot achieve both. We cannot include aviation and shipping and have an 80 per cent. cut by 2050. That will just not be possible.
	The baseline year for the percentage calculations is 1990. My figures for the United Kingdom are from DEFRA's website and are for the period 1990 to 2005, a 15-year period, which is one quarter of the period 1990 to 2050. One would not expect to make much progress in the first couple of years, but then the technological benefits should kick in, albeit before the law of diminishing returns starts to apply as we approach 2050, thereby lessening savings in CO2 emissions. However, my figures, which are for the first 25 per cent. of that period, show that CO2 emissions, which constitute 84 per cent. of the basket of greenhouse gas emissions in DEFRA's calculations, went down by 6.4 per cent. Overall greenhouse gas emissions in the United Kingdom went down by 15.3 per cent. in that period.
	For all our debate so far and for all the importance of cutting emissions and including aviation and shipping, as highlighted by new clause 15 and amendment No. 72, we are deluding ourselves and the electorate if we think that we as a society can include aviation and shipping, which we should, and have an 80 per cent. target for 2050.

Andrew Tyrie: I strongly agree with the hon. Gentleman's line of argument. He might also like to point out that almost all the 6 per cent. improvement that he mentioned was a result of gas privatisation and the consequent dash for gas, which was opposed by the Labour party throughout its passage in the House. Since that one-off change, which mainly happened before the end of the millennium, there has been virtually no improvement at all. In fact, that figure has gone into reverse in recent years.

Rob Marris: The figures that I received from the Library about nine to 12 months ago indicated that between 1999 and 2006, which were the latest figures that the Library could supply, per capita CO2 emissions in the United Kingdom increased—not by a lot, but they did increase. The trend was in the wrong direction. Therefore, to suggest that an 80 per cent. cut is feasible troubles me greatly.
	The youngest Member of the House is the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson), who was here for the earlier part of the debate, but has had to slip out. She is 28. She will be 70 in 2050. It is unlikely that she will be an active Member of the House by then.  [ Interruption. ] I hear chuntering, which will no doubt be recorded in  Hansard as an interruption. I carefully used the adjective "unlikely". I did not say that she would not be a Member. That is a measure of the problem, when our youngest Member will be one of the oldest Members, if she is still here, in 2050. It is an abdication of responsibility and comes close to misleading people to say that we can include aviation and shipping and have an 80 per cent. cut when, on tables of life expectancy and life patterns, no one who is currently in the Chamber will be an active politician in 42 years' time.

Lynne Jones: I take my hon. Friend's point about the seriousness with which we must approach the targets. Clearly we have woefully missed them so far. We have a target of achieving a 20 per cent. cut in CO2 emissions by 2010, which we are nowhere near. What informs the targets for 2050, however, is surely the need to limit the overall concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Therefore, it is up to us to find the mechanisms to help us to achieve those targets. By saying that we cannot achieve them, we are already being faint hearted. We could have achieved the earlier targets that we set ourselves had the will been there. We must have the will to achieve the new targets.

Rob Marris: Willing the means does not mean that we will get there and it can be counter-productive. If I challenged my hon. Friend to run 100 m in 14 seconds, for example, she might train and try to do it. If I challenged her to run 100 m in 10.5 seconds, I suspect that she would not even bother to start training. That will be the position of the electorate, particularly when they see us, rightly and as I hope that we will, including aviation and shipping in the approach to cutting emissions, which we must do, as well as addressing adaptation. However, the thought that will strike many of my constituents is this: "We can't do both, so why should I bother doing anything?"

John Gummer: But surely the alternative is even worse. If the hon. Gentleman is suggesting that we should have targets that are not sufficiently good to solve the problem, nobody would take any part at all. The targets are not invented; they are necessary if we are to counter climate change. We owe it to our constituents to say, "That's what we've got to do and we've got to find a way of doing it," not to pretend that we can go for an easier target because it is better electorally.

Rob Marris: I humbly suggest to the right hon. Gentleman that he is completely wrong. There is no question of "solving the problem". The 80 per cent. target is proposed in order to limit climate change to an average of 2° C, not to keep at a certain level with no change. The figure of 2° C is somewhat arbitrary—indeed, anything that we do in that regard is arbitrary—but if we set ourselves up to fail, then fail we surely shall.

Michael Weir: I will be relatively brief, as most of the issues have probably been covered by now. I welcome the amendments from the Government, who have moved a long way from where they started. I listened carefully to what the Minister said about the Government's amendments and why they were not going slightly further than we would wish.
	I appreciate the difficulties with aviation and shipping. I heard what she said about the possibility of going for a sectoral system, along the lines of the EU emissions trading scheme. I can well see how that might be attractive for aviation, since we are talking about a relatively small number of international airlines flying into the UK. However, I am not sure that that would work so well for shipping, which is a very different industry and may, I suspect, need different treatment. As an aside, the point that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming) made about ships not always using oil is an interesting one. If I remember my history correctly, the development of warships in the early 20th century led the movement towards the use of oil to power shipping rather than steam or sails, but that is by the by.
	It is important to include shipping, however, because apart from the quantity of emissions in general, there is a problem with shipping, particularly with older ships that use heavy oil, which is very polluting, thereby contributing greatly towards climate change. Aviation also contributes to climate change, but the other day I noticed a report saying that Boeing believed that it would be able to develop biofuels for aircraft within the next few years. Given the problems that have been experienced with biofuels in other areas, however, I am dubious about how much that will move matters forward.
	Listening to the Minister and appreciating the difficulties, I come close to agreeing with her. However, when she talked about the need to reach international agreement, I heard the call of the long grass, because, to a large extent, that has been the problem until now.
	The right hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley), who is no longer in his place, said that one reason that international shipping and aviation were not included in the Kyoto protocol was simply that international agreement on the issue could not be reached at that time. It seems unlikely that it will be any easier to reach an international agreement now than it was then. Indeed, given that the world is undoubtedly going into a recession—we have heard the views of some hon. Members on that today—some Governments are already trying to rein back from their green policies for fear of their impact on their national economies. The chance of reaching an international agreement is therefore receding rather than improving. The idea of being able to reach such an agreement before the Copenhagen conference is pie in the sky.
	I definitely got the impression from the Minister that there had not been a great deal of progress on this matter, yet I note that the section of the Library research paper on calculating emissions states:
	"Under the Kyoto Protocol, the United Kingdom has a legally binding obligation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 12.5 per cent. below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. Aviation is split into domestic and international for the purpose of calculating emission levels and for Kyoto. International carbon dioxide emissions from aviation do not come under the Kyoto agreement and so are not calculated in the UK's emission...totals for this purpose".
	It goes on to say that the Department for Transport
	"states that this is because 'there is no international agreement yet on ways of allocating such emissions'".
	That point was made by the Minister. It goes on:
	"Despite this, under Kyoto, signatory nations do report estimates of international aviation bunker fuel emissions as a 'memo item' in their national greenhouse gas inventories."
	That point is also made by Friends of the Earth. So these emissions are calculated, and I believe that that gives the United Kingdom a basis for moving forward.

Joan Ruddock: It might be helpful if I clarify this point. There is a real difference between knowing what global emissions are—having a figure for global emissions that is calculated in a particular way for this reporting under Kyoto—and being able to account for a proportion of those emissions in any particular sovereign state. That is the issue.

Michael Weir: But there is a basis for calculating the figures for sovereign states, as I understand it, and progress has been made. This is not a question of starting with a blank sheet.
	Much has been made of the point, which was raised by the right hon. Member for Scunthorpe, that we must take into account these emissions. That is also a concern of mine. In Committee, I raised concerns about the get-out clauses, the ambiguities relating to the setting of the 2050 target and the carbon budget, and the fact that economic differences and various changes should be taken into account. In my view, there are too many get-out clauses, if we are serious about attempting to reach the carbon targets that we are setting. I would be tempted to support the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) if he were to put it to a vote. It places a duty on the Secretary of State and removes some of the dubiety and some of the possibility of a get-out. That would be useful.
	What is needed is leadership. We have to show the way in which these emissions are to be included in international agreements. It is all very well to talk about reaching such agreements, but I have never seen one that was quickly negotiated, and I suspect that this one will drag on as well. The Scottish Government have pledged to include aviation and shipping in their Climate Change Bill. That shows leadership, and this House should also show leadership by moving down that route.

Sammy Wilson: First, I have to say how pleased I am that, at least towards the end of the debate on this group of amendments, I heard some voices querying what is being done in this part of the Bill. That shows that there is another side to the argument. The tactic of those who have driven the Bill forward has been to give the impression that those who take a contrary view are cranks who do not care about the environment and are isolated. This is in spite of the fact that the most recent survey of climate scientists indicates that 46 per cent. of them disagree with the view that climate change is solely down to the activities of man. There is no scientific consensus on this, and there have been attempts to silence those who take a different view.

Rob Marris: Does the hon. Gentleman accept that human activity is a significant contributory factor to the change that many scientists say the climate has been undergoing in the past 50 years?

Sammy Wilson: I think I have already made it clear that 46 per cent. of climate scientists believe that climate change is not solely down to the activity of man. That means, of course, that there are scientists who believe that it is. There is an array of environmentalists, scientists and economists who take a contrary view, however, and who believe that the impact of man is not significant. I want to make it clear that I happen to share that view.

David Chaytor: I am curious about the 46 per cent. of climate scientists. Will the hon. Gentleman tell the House why none of them is represented on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the authoritative body? Is this a global conspiracy?

Sammy Wilson: If one looks at the second IPCC report, one can see that Sir John Houghton suggested that he had excluded the views of some of those scientists because they did not fit in with the general view. There is a wide range of views among scientists who were engaged on the panel, and other views were deliberately excluded.

Mark Lazarowicz: Will the hon. Gentleman give the House the source of his assertion that 46 per cent. of scientists disagree with the view that climate change is caused by human activity?

Sammy Wilson: I do not have the names of the two scientists involved, but they are associated with the Hamburg institute. The latest revision of the relevant survey took place in 2005, so this is a fairly up-to-date assertion. Indeed, let us look at some of the comments on the IPCC report.  The Wall Street Journal talked about a "cover-up in the greenhouse" and pointed to some views having been suppressed.

Andrew Tyrie: Professor von Storch, who is probably Germany's leading climate scientist, undertook that survey. Unfortunately, it has not been given a wide enough circulation. That same survey showed that one third of climate scientists did not believe that the lion's share of recently observed warming was anthropogenic in nature. Is the hon. Gentleman aware that a significant proportion of IPCC scientists have resigned in disgust because their views have not been reflected in the reports? They include some of the world's leading climate scientists, such as Professor Richard Lindzen, who has said that
	"only the most senior scientists today can stand up against this alarmist gale".

Colin Challen: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Will we be able to return to the question of aviation and shipping shortly?

Mr. Deputy Speaker: These are matters that hon. Members can safely leave to the Chair.

Sammy Wilson: I accept that I was probably led astray by the Members who intervened; they diverted me from the point that I was briefly trying to establish. I was arguing that a wide range of people are still sceptical about the main causes of climate change, which brings me to my point about the inclusion of aviation and shipping in the Bill.
	If we have already gone down the road of including a wide range of our industries, our domestic fuel consumption and a number of climate-change regulations, the impact will be compounded when we include shipping and aviation. As others have pointed out, all this has been done without any indication of the cost to the relevant industries. I noted what the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) said about industries paying for the cost of the carbon they use, but the truth of the matter is that it is not some anonymous "they", as in a shipping or airline company as, eventually, this comes down to costs that are passed on to consumers, travellers and all of us in respect of transporting our food to the shops where we purchase it. Those are real costs that our constituents will have to pay.

Barry Gardiner: Is the hon. Gentleman aware of the research carried out by Lord Stern and others, showing that the costs of inaction are substantially higher than the costs of acting to mitigate climate change now?

Sammy Wilson: I note that, but as was pointed out earlier, the discount rates in Lord Stern's report grossly exaggerate the benefits of taking action and underestimate the cost of doing so. In artificially applying a 2 per cent. discount rate, he of course got the answer that he wanted. By any stretch of the imagination, costs amounting to 2 per cent. of gross domestic product will have a massive impact on our ability to finance public services. Again, those costs will be felt by individuals.
	Some of the costs identified by Lord Stern—the impact on flooding, on food production and so forth—were predictions based on models with hundreds of variables. Even scientists have accepted that they do not understand all the connections between those variables. The hon. Member for Brent, North (Barry Gardiner) will know something about economic modelling, but climate change modelling is even more complicated and even less certain. We already know the impact of some economic models and we know how true the connections have been. The inclusion of aviation and shipping in the Bill has been accomplished without spelling out the costs. We will all be held responsible and we will all be held to account for that. What are the costs for our constituents? They have not been spelled out.
	Secondly, as has emerged from a number of speeches, the degree of state and international planning involved in the whole exercise is considerable. Indeed, the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker) pointed out that there are often unintended consequences in pursuing state and international planning. I heard the enthusiasm of some Conservative Members; they usually argue in favour of the working of the market and the market economy, yet some of them seemed to embrace a degree of state control and state planning that would make some of the left-wing Labour Members cheer and clap at the prospect. My second point, then, is that there will be a huge increase in Government regulation and Government interference in the economy, with all the consequences that will follow, yet we know how successful state planning has been in the past.
	Thirdly, all this pain will not have an impact on CO2 emissions in any case, because most of them are to be taken up by the use of the emissions trading scheme, whereby permits to pollute and produce emissions can be bought. We have already heard about caps, but Europe is awash with permits at the moment. To get Russia involved in the Kyoto protocol, it was given permits based on 1990 levels—when, of course, CO2 emissions from huge, inefficient and dirty state industries were massive. Many of those industries have closed down; their emissions are no longer. However, the ETS mechanism will enable aviation and shipping industries to purchase, from Russia and other countries awash with emissions, certificates to produce CO2 emissions that are not currently being produced. Rather than a reduction, we could actually see an increase in CO2 emissions. The impact will only add to the costs of industry, which will then be borne by consumers and people who wish to travel.
	The hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb), speaking for the Liberal Democrats, said that he thought this was more a nudge and a wink, and that nothing much would be done at the end of the day as the Government would find ways around meeting the targets. That might well be the best result. The problem is that in the interim we are going to face additional costs and additional disadvantages to our economy.
	My hon. Friend the Member for South Antrim (Dr. McCrea)—he totally disagrees with my views on this issue, incidentally, but I agree with him on this—pointed out that those costs will not be felt evenly. Some constituencies will suffer the costs much more heavily than others. If we are going to vote this Bill through, we should at least make people aware of the impact it is likely to have on them, their livelihoods and their economic activities.

David Taylor: rose—

Sammy Wilson: I was about to close, but I will give way to the hon. Gentleman.

David Taylor: I thank my hon. Friend—well, he is a friend outside the Chamber—for giving way. In articulating the case that outcomes are uncertain, costs substantial, modelling complex and time scales very lengthy, is he not putting forward a counsel of despair, a prediction of inertia or a "do nothing" approach in the face of global problems? Surely that is not the impression that he is trying to give to the House, or is it?

Sammy Wilson: I shall not go into all that, as I have probably pushed your indulgence to the limit, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but there may be opportunities later in the debate to look at what can be done. If there is, as I accept, global warming, climate change and impacts stemming from them and if we are going to keep using our resources, let us look into what we can do now that will make an impact now—not some time in the future, when, as has already been pointed out, most of us will not even be in the House anyway!

Joan Ruddock: I note from the clock that we have spent three hours on the first group of amendments; we have five such groups and only five hours of debate. I propose not to respond to all the issues raised, but just to some of the most direct ones that were put to me.
	The hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker) asked about the definition of international aviation and shipping. We have not yet defined it, but there is a provision in the Bill whereby we will be able to provide it in due course. We will, of course, consider all possibilities. The hon. Gentleman also effectively criticised us in saying that this is a framework Bill whereas we really need to know what is going to be done to put it all in place. I remind him that as soon as is reasonably practicable after we have set our carbon budgets, we shall have to publish a report saying exactly that: what we will have to do in order to meet those carbon budgets. That is in clause 13, as currently drafted.
	The right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) raised many interesting points. He focused chiefly on shipping, which he suggested should be dealt with separately. The Bill does allow us to treat aviation and shipping separately, for precisely the reasons that he gave. The hon. Member for Angus (Mr. Weir) made a similar point.
	The right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal questioned our commitment to working with the International Maritime Organisation. I referred earlier to the amount of energy we had put into working with the IMO, and how we had pushed forward the work being done. As I said then, we have made a voluntary contribution of £50,000 to the funding of a study of the important subject of greenhouse gas emissions from ships. I assure the right hon. Gentleman that we are on the case and will continue to press it, because we understand how important it is.
	At times this evening, it seemed as though Members had never flown and did not intend ever to fly in the future. I must tell them that aviation currently accounts for 6 per cent. of our emissions, and that shipping accounts for just over 1 per cent. We must keep in proportion the contribution that each makes to our economy and the cost in terms of emissions at this time. We know that there will be huge increases in the future, but we must understand where we are now. Of course, it will take time for progress to be made.

Robert Smith: Will the Minister give way?

Joan Ruddock: I do not think I should. We are running badly behind time.
	The right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) questioned the costs involved, as he has on previous occasions. The shadow Committee on Climate Change estimates the cost to the United Kingdom of meeting an 80 per cent. greenhouse gas reduction target to be between 1 and 2 per cent. of GDP in 2050. That was set out very clearly, and, as the right hon. Gentleman knows from the Stern report, most of us—although that may not include him—accept that the costs of inaction are much greater than the costs of action.
	We broadly agree with the range that the Committee has identified. In overall terms, costs of between 1 and 2 per cent. of GDP in 2050—

Peter Lilley: Will the Minister give way?

Joan Ruddock: Not at the moment. Let me tell the right hon. Gentleman that costs of between 1 and 2 per cent. of GDP in 2050 would mean that the United Kingdom economy would be 3.17 times larger in 2050, rather than 3.2 times larger. There is a cost; estimates exist. The fact is that we know that not acting would cost us dearly.

Peter Lilley: Will the Minister give way?

Joan Ruddock: The right hon. Gentleman has made his points many times before.

Peter Lilley: No, I have not.

Joan Ruddock: He made them on Second Reading and he has made them again today, at some length.
	Details of costs will be informed by the formal advice that the Government will receive from the committee for the first time in December. The right hon. Gentleman has only to wait until then.
	The hon. Member for South Antrim (Dr. McCrea) made a number of points about the potential disadvantage that would be suffered in Northern Ireland. Let me assure him that the Secretary of State must consult the devolved Administrations on amending targets, setting budgets, and any proposals and policies for meeting budgets.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson), my right hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley) and my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) produced strong and cogent arguments for why the House should not divide on the Liberal Democrat amendments. It is clear to us that, as has been acknowledged by Conservative Members in particular, we have moved considerably on the Bill. We now have a procedure that will enable us to receive advice that takes account of international shipping and aviation.

Steve Webb: It is just advice.

Joan Ruddock: The hon. Gentleman may say that, but we have included in this flagship Bill provision for an independent Committee on Climate Change, which already exists in shadow form. It is regarded as a committee of great stature, which will continue to be the case.

Steve Webb: It can be ignored.

Joan Ruddock: I think that when we consider the Bill's passage—how we are moving towards, we hope, an Act of Parliament—the hon. Gentleman will understand that the world will be watching us, and the House will be watching us. There is total transparency in the way we intend to conduct ourselves, and I assure the hon. Gentleman that we will take the greatest note of, and have the greatest respect for, the advice of the Committee on Climate Change. As I have said, transparency is guaranteed.
	We wish to accept amendment No. 72, which adds to our new clause 5.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Clause read a Second time, and added to the Bill.

New Clause 16
	 — 
	Carbon emissions reduction targets

'Schedule [Carbon emissions reduction targets] contains amendments to the provisions of the Gas Act 1986 (c. 44), the Electricity Act 1989 (c. 29) and the Utilities Act 2000 (c. 27) relating to carbon emissions reduction targets.'.— [Joan Ruddock.]
	 Brought up, and read the First time.

Joan Ruddock: I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
	New clause 10— Sectoral targets
	"2A Sectoral Targets
	(1) For the purpose of assisting with the achievement of the target specified in section 1, or any amendment thereto made pursuant to section 2, the Secretary of State must take all reasonable steps to ensure that the government sectoral targets for the time being specified in subsection (2) are achieved.
	(2) The sectoral targets referred to in subsection (1) are—
	(a) by 2020 the general level of energy efficiency of residential accommodation has increased by at least 20 per cent. compared with the general level of such energy efficiency in 2010;
	(b) by the end of 2010 the general level of energy usage in the commercial and public services sector has reduced by at least 10 per cent. compared with the general level of such energy usage in 2005 and by the end of 2020 by at least 10 per cent. compared with the general level of such energy usage in 2010;
	(c) as soon as is practicable the number of dwellings with one or more microgeneration installations shall be eight times the number of dwellings with one or more microgeneration installations in 2007.
	(3) In this section—
	"the commercial and public services sector" means—
	(a) commercial and business premises, excluding industry;(b) retail premises, including warehousing;(c) hotels and restaurants;(d) premises used for the provision of any service or function by or on behalf of a public body.
	"microgeneration" has the same meaning as in the Energy Act 2004.'.
	New clause 11— Greenhouse gas emissions performance standard (electricity generating stations)
	'(1) The Secretary of State may make provision by regulations for a greenhouse gas emissions performance standard to set the maximum level of carbon dioxide that may be emitted per unit of output by any generating station requiring consent for construction or extension under section 36 of the Electricity Act 1989 (c.29).
	(2) Regulations made under subsection (1) may include provision—
	(a) specifying how proposed generation stations are able to comply with any greenhouse gas emissions performance standard, and to demonstrate compliance with any regulations made under this section, including by the capture of carbon dioxide at the generating station and its transport to and injection into geological storage provided that such activities are licensed in accordance with applicable laws and regulations;
	(b) specifying the basis on which emissions of greenhouse gases from combined heat and power generating stations shall be calculated such that the unit of output includes useful heat produced in addition to electricity generated by any such generating station;
	(c) specifying any sources of electricity generation, including electricity generated from renewable sources, that are deemed to be compliant with any greenhouse gas emissions performance standard.
	(3) No consent shall be granted under section 36 of the Electricity Act 1989 for any generating station that does not comply with regulations made under subsection (1).
	(4) Before making regulations under subsection (1) (including setting the level of the greenhouse gas emissions performance standard), the Secretary of State must consult such persons as are likely to be affected by or have an interest in the regulations.
	(5) Regulations made under subsection (1) shall be made by statutory instrument, which may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before, and approved by resolution of, each House of Parliament.
	(6) In this section—
	"greenhouse gas emissions performance standard" means a standard prescribed by regulations setting the maximum level of carbon dioxide that may be emitted per unit of output from an individual generating station.'.
	Government amendment No. 45
	Government new schedule 1— Carbon emissions reduction targets.
	Government amendment No. 51.

Joan Ruddock: The new clauses and amendments contain various proposals to tackle emissions from particular sectors of the economy. The Bill's overarching objective is to ensure that each budget is met, along with the 2050 target. In environmental terms, it does not matter where in the economy the emissions reductions come from, and we consider it important to retain the flexibility to act wherever it is most cost-effective to do so.
	The Government new clauses and schedule give effect to our commitment to creating a new community energy savings programme, as announced by the Prime Minister on 11 September. The House will be familiar with the existing CERT scheme—the carbon emissions reduction target scheme—under which the major energy suppliers are obliged to promote carbon-saving measures to households in Great Britain. Each of the various measures has a score that is defined in terms of carbon reductions, and each supplier must meet a target level of carbon emissions reductions over the three years of the programme.
	As I think all Members will acknowledge, energy efficiency is never more important than at a time when rising energy prices have made it so difficult for large numbers of people to afford to heat their homes adequately. We need to ensure that vulnerable households obtain all the help that they can. It was with that in mind that the Prime Minister launched the home energy savings programme, a suite of measures designed to help households to save both money and energy.
	The package included two significant changes to CERT arrangements. First, the Prime Minister proposed a 20 per cent. increase in the existing CERT target, and additional amendments to strengthen the CERT scheme. Both can be achieved without changes in primary legislation. Secondly, he announced proposals for a new community energy savings programme. The new clauses and amendments make the necessary changes to enable the Secretary of State to introduce secondary legislation creating the new scheme, which will be based on the CERT model but will have a number of novel features.
	The precise arrangements will be subject to consultation, and we do not yet have fixed ideas, but one of the key features is that the scheme will be community-focused. It will be designed as far as possible to bring together the activity of the energy companies with that of local authorities and other key organisations in a particular area. We want action to be joined-up and comprehensive, and we want to see real community delivery on a house-by-house, street-by-street level. I know that a number of my hon. Friends, and indeed other hon. Members, have called for such an approach.

Joan Walley: I welcome the proposals that my hon. Friend is describing. Can she assure me that she will take account of areas such as Stoke-on-Trent, where we already have a warm zone scheme, so that we can ensure that all the partners dealing with energy efficiency work side by side, not just on fuel poverty but on energy efficiency?

Joan Ruddock: I can certainly give my hon. Friend that assurance. I pay tribute to her for the work that she has done, and for the way in which she continually brings to Ministers the views of her constituents on how well the programmes have worked on the ground.

Robert Smith: As the Minister will know, people who are not on the gas main find it extremely difficult to heat their homes, especially as they have to rely on oil and other fuels. Will the new scheme allow CERT to be redirected, to recognise the benefits of heat pumps both in providing a cheaper means of heating the home and in reducing carbon emissions?

Joan Ruddock: I am a bit of an enthusiast for heat pumps, and I am very much alive to the issue that the hon. Gentleman raises. I want us to be able to look at these schemes to see whether more assistance can be provided to people who are off the gas main—but, as I have said, we have not yet worked out the details. However, there will be consultation and we will, of course, be pleased to hear from the hon. Gentleman.
	The new scheme will be funded and delivered by the energy suppliers and, for the first time, by the energy generators too. The generators are not at present covered by CERT, but we believe that all companies in the energy market now have a responsibility to help those in need of support. I am grateful for the constructive spirit in which the generators are already approaching the new proposals.
	We expect to set the carbon savings target for the community energy savings programme at 12.5 per cent. of the current overall CERT target, equating to collective expenditure by the energy companies estimated at about £350 million over three years. I look forward to receiving input from a large number of parties as we refine the proposals, but for the moment we need to establish the powers that will allow us to flesh out the details of the scheme more fully in a statutory instrument, and that is what our Government amendments achieve.
	New clause 10 would add to the Bill specific energy efficiency, energy usage and microgeneration targets. We recognise that we will need to deliver in each of those areas in order to meet the targets and budgets that the Committee on Climate Change will undoubtedly advise us of, but new clause 10 would remove the flexibility that we consider essential to the overall framework that maximises cost-effectiveness. We recognise the importance of providing increased certainty regarding which sectors of the economy will be required to act to ensure that we meet the targets and budgets, and that is why we amended the Bill on Report in the other place to provide greater sector-specific transparency.
	The Bill contains a number of provisions to ensure that sector-specific issues are covered. Clause 33 requires that the Committee on Climate Change's advice on the level of carbon budgets must set out the sectors of the economy in which there are particular opportunities for contributions to be made to meeting that budget. That is supplemented by the requirement in clause 13 for the Government's report on proposals and policies for meeting carbon budgets to explain how the proposals and policies affect different sectors of the economy. Together, those requirements will ensure that a forward-looking process is in place for both the Committee on Climate Change when it provides its advice, and the Government in setting out how the proposals and policies for meeting a budget may affect different sectors.

John Gummer: Will the Minister explain why she has not taken this moment to ensure that the arrangements, particularly for the electricity and gas industries, include the introduction of smart metering, so that every one of us can play a part in making these decisions?

Joan Ruddock: I understand that we all have our enthusiasms and that the right hon. Gentleman has an enthusiasm for smart meters. We are very alive to this issue as well, and we will continue to be so—and I understand that it has been a subject of debate in the other place's discussions of the Energy Bill today.
	Let me briefly turn to microgeneration, which is one of the areas new clause 10 covers. As hon. Members will be aware, in considering the Energy Bill on Report in the other place on 22 October, my noble Friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath committed us to introduce an amendment to the Energy Bill to support small-scale generation by means of a feed-in tariff. The details of the amendment, including the level of an upper limit for the feed-in tariff, are still being considered, but it will be tabled ahead of Third Reading in the other place on 5 November. It will be an enabling power, and we aim to consult on these issues next summer.

Gregory Barker: This very belated conversion to feed-in tariffs—which the Conservatives have been campaigning on for two years now—is very welcome, but we have yet to see the detail, and as the detail will be of critical importance, can the Minister now tell us who will pay for the feed-in tariff?  [Interruption.]

Joan Ruddock: As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has just pointed out from a sedentary position, our Department has been in existence for only three weeks, so we think we are acting rather swiftly. I have already said that details are not yet available, so I am not in a position to give the hon. Gentleman any more information.

Lynne Jones: My hon. Friend says that the new Department is acting swiftly, but I have just heard her say that the consultation will not take place until next summer. I take on board the point that the proposals need to be drawn together, but since there are established mechanisms in neighbouring EU countries, I should not have thought that it would take until next summer just to start the consultation.

Joan Ruddock: I hear what my hon. Friend says. I was advised on this, and there are procedures, but I am more than willing to look into the matter she raises, because I share her interest in making things happen faster.
	In summary, new clause 10 may restrict the Government's ability to introduce policies to ensure the requirements of the Bill are met cost-effectively. For that reason and the others I have mentioned, I cannot agree to the amendment.
	New clause 11 would introduce a specific cap for emissions per unit of output from the power sector. We have three main difficulties with this amendment, which, as I understand it, is designed to prevent the construction of new coal-fired power stations without carbon capture technology. First, there is no guarantee that it would reduce UK emissions, and certainly not within the EU. Secondly, it may have the effect of slowing down or halting the development of carbon capture and storage technology, which would make it harder to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions in the long term. Thirdly, it would risk jeopardising the security of the UK's energy supply.
	I am sure that I am required to give a little more detail, so I shall oblige. The EU emissions trading scheme caps emissions from all UK power stations over a 20 MW threshold, and is key to achieving emissions reductions while maintaining a secure and diverse supply of energy. Under EU proposals currently being discussed, the EU ETS cap is expected to continue to decrease up to 2020 on a scale calibrated to enable the EU to meet its 2020 climate and energy targets. As the cap tightens, power station operators will need either to reduce their own emissions or to buy carbon allowances, thus financing emission reductions elsewhere in the EU economy. That trading mechanism ensures that abatement occurs at the least-cost location, which is one of the scheme's key principles. In this context, the proposed amendment might affect where the EU's emissions come from, but not the overall level, which is determined by the level of the cap. That is an important point. The cap ensures that there can be no more emissions, even if new capacity is produced.
	By putting a price on carbon, the EU ETS encourages investment in new, more efficient power stations and technologies with lower emissions. The proposal may, on the other hand, have the perverse incentive of encouraging older, less efficient fossil fuel power stations to keep operating by cutting off the option of building new, more efficient fossil fuel power stations in the UK.

Gregory Barker: Is the Minister therefore saying that this Government would condone and want to see the building of new coal-fired power stations without carbon capture and storage?

Joan Ruddock: Clearly, we are not prejudging the issue, but I must make the following point to the hon. Gentleman. If, for example, a new coal-fired power station replaces an ageing coal-fired power station and the new station has a 20 per cent. increased efficiency over the old, even without carbon capture and storage there might still be a benefit.

Graham Stuart: Surely when the energy sector is the one sector through which, using today's technology, we can deliver a roadway to zero emissions, to replace current capacity with a system that has only a 20 per cent. reduction in energy use and that will be in place for decades to come is to put up the white flag of surrender.

Joan Ruddock: I repeat that we are not prejudging the decision, but the new clause would prejudge any decision.

John Gummer: May I help the Minister not to prejudge it by saying that if we build a new power station that is 20 per cent. more efficient, it will also have a much longer time in operation? If we are talking about 2050, what we do about carbon capture and storage really is an issue to consider. Conservative Members would like at least the provision for a real step forward to be put in place before we endanger the long-term arrangements.

Joan Ruddock: I share the right hon. Gentleman's aspirations. We are one of the few countries in the world that will allow for a demonstration of carbon capture and storage, and the Government have been very active in pressing on that issue. Of course, there is always the possibility that we can get the technology working and make use of it in future.

Paddy Tipping: Will my hon. Friend remind me of the Government's policy on carbon capture and storage? Are we not one of the few countries in the world that are supporting it? Are we not one of the few countries that are in discussions with the EU about it, talking about some of the 12 demonstration plants that are coming to Great Britain? On a more critical point, I know that my hon. Friend will not want to comment on Kingsnorth power station, but it would make sense to make early decisions and announcements, whatever they are.

Joan Ruddock: I am always keen to go further and faster, so I understand my hon. Friend's point, but I am not going to speak about that particular installation and its application tonight. I do wish to say, however, how grateful I am to him for reminding the House of the Government's enthusiasm for carbon capture and storage. Not only do we wish to seek a project in this country, but we have been very active in the EU and supported its programme for a number of plants. In addition, critically, we are working with China, which will continue to have coal-fired power stations for decades and decades. If carbon capture and storage matters here, it matters much more in China.

Gregory Barker: If the Minister is right that the Government are leading the world in carbon capture and storage, will she tell the House what resources they are putting behind a CCS programme? Is it just the miserable tens of millions of pounds over a period of years to which a ministerial colleague of hers has referred? With how much is she prepared to back her words?

Joan Ruddock: I might invite the hon. Gentleman to consider how much he wants to back— [Interruption.] Oh, he says that he is committed and signed up.

Gregory Barker: ETS credits.

Joan Ruddock: Oh, it is coming from the ETS credits. Fine.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. We cannot have casual, chatty conversations. Proper interventions are far more satisfactory.

Martin Horwood: rose—

Joan Ruddock: I give way to the hon. Gentleman.

Martin Horwood: Given the Minister's claim that we are in some kind of leadership position on carbon capture and storage, will she congratulate China on having a working demonstration project well ahead of us? Does she therefore regret her predecessor Department's decision to have a carbon capture competition so narrowly drawn and poorly funded that it led to the cancellation of carbon capture projects in this country?

Joan Ruddock: I would take issue with the hon. Gentleman's last remark. I do not think that it has ever been claimed that the decision not to go ahead at Peterhead, to which he refers, was the result of Government action. It was a private decision by a private company. I reiterate that we are enthusiastic about carbon capture and storage. Believe me, we raise it in every international forum, we are doing the work on the ground and we will have a project. I congratulate China on that and on many other aspects of its move to low-carbon technologies.

David Chaytor: When does the Minister expect the results of the CCS competition to come through, and when will it be feasible for CCS to be retrofitted to existing power stations?

Joan Ruddock: I am sorry that my hon. Friend has posed that question, because I am not in a position to give him an answer. The process is being gone through, and I cannot give him that information today. I am sorry.

Lynne Jones: I have supported new clause 11. Given the reservations of my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris) about the feasibility of achieving the 80 per cent. target by 2050, including in aviation, I am horrified that we should be supporting new power stations that are only 20 per cent. more efficient in carbon dioxide emissions. Surely if the new clause were accepted, it would be an incentive to people wanting to build new power stations to have to invest in carbon capture and storage technology. How can we contemplate giving permission for a coal-fired power station without carbon capture and storage?

Joan Ruddock: Perhaps my hon. Friend will listen to the rest of my remarks and then make up her mind about what she has just said and how she wants to react. Because I have taken interventions, I have not been able to get to some of the remarks that I want to make, which I think will cover some of her points.
	Ruling out new, more efficient coal stations now would be likely to hamper the development of carbon capture technology, as I have indicated. The efficiency penalty associated with the capture of carbon dioxide makes retrofitting the technology to older, less efficient power stations a much less attractive option than installing new build. The right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) said that such stations would be in use for a much longer time, but it remains the case that it would be more attractive to link carbon capture and storage to a new station than to retrofit an old one.

Gavin Strang: This point is hugely important. As far as Peterhead is concerned, that was gas, and sadly we can now leave that matter parked. The fact is that we need both systems so that we can retrofit and build power stations with new CCS. That is the problem. There is real concern that we need to be putting in a lot more resources.

Joan Ruddock: I thank my right hon. Friend for his contribution. I am trying to say to the House that it will be easier to build a new power station, and the incentive will be there. New clause 11 would rule out a new power station. I am not speaking generally, I am speaking to the new clause and the fact that it would rule that out. As I understand it, the new clause specifies that no new coal station should be built unless it had carbon capture fitted, but at the moment it is not possible to fit that technology because it is not available on a commercial scale.

Gregory Barker: The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Let me be absolutely clear: the Conservatives are saying that no new generation of dirty coal will be built under a Conservative Administration.

Joan Ruddock: As I have already said, that prejudges the issue. As I wish to come on to say, there are other issues involved, not least security of supply. My right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, East (Dr. Strang) said that we need to have both, and we not only want to have retrofitting if it is possible, but we certainly want linkage to new facilities. The technology applies to gas as well as coal, of course. CCS is not simply a coal technology.

Gregory Barker: The hon. Lady is speaking good sense. Unfortunately, she is not articulating Government policy, which is to have just one form of technology. She should therefore support the Conservatives' much more ambitious CCS proposal, which is for post-combustion, pre-combustion and oxycombustion capture. If she would like to join us in our costed, ambitious programme, that would be great. Unfortunately, all that she has to defend is a rather piddling, unambitious, sometime never CCS programme.

Joan Ruddock: I do not think that I need to respond to those remarks.

Barry Gardiner: Will my hon. Friend be kind enough to confirm that if we were to accept new clause 11, as proposed by the Opposition, it could leave the country vulnerable? Old power stations would come to an end, so if CCS was not commercially viable, there would be no replacement facilities and, therefore, new clause 11 could put us in a position where the lights went out.

Joan Ruddock: I never want to anticipate the lights going out, but I can confirm that everything else my hon. Friend said is correct.

David Heath: I am puzzled, because the Minister has said on a large number of occasions that she does not want to prejudge these matters, yet is not the entire Bill based on prejudging the issues and on the fact that we do not want highly polluting technologies that will prevent us from reaching our climate change targets?

Joan Ruddock: I am sorry, but I cannot agree with the hon. Gentleman.

Several hon. Members: rose —

Joan Ruddock: I wish to make some progress now, not least because I want us to get to the other groups of amendments.
	We need new, efficient coal power stations if we are to encourage and support the crucial development of CCS technology. New clause 11 would adversely affect our energy security objectives. We are facing particular energy security challenges at the moment. Coal and oil-fired power stations producing 12 GW—equivalent to 20 per cent. of peak demand—are due to close by 2015, and that is in addition to the closure by the end of 2023 of nuclear power stations that produce about 5 GW. That will make us increasingly reliant on imports of gas, with all that that means.

Graham Stuart: I am trying to follow the hon. Lady's argument about how brand new coal-fired power stations, which pump pollution into the atmosphere, will be easier to retrofit with yet-to-be-developed technology than old ones. Is it not possible that we will discover that brand new supercritical power stations turn out to be harder to retrofit when we eventually obtain the relevant technology? Does she have any evidence to back up her claim that new power stations will be easier to retrofit than old ones?

Joan Ruddock: What I know is that new clause 11 says that we should not have any new coal-fired power stations unless a particular technology—CCS—is available, but the fact is that it is not available at the moment. An issue is being prejudged, and I am making a case against new clause 11.
	Although we hope for a major expansion of renewables and nuclear power, those technologies alone will not meet all our electricity needs, especially given that we will need flexible power stations that are able to provide back-up support because of the intermittency of renewable generation. Without coal, the only option is gas, and that has all the implications for energy security that I have mentioned.
	We take seriously the need to reduce emissions from fossil fuel power stations. Significant improvements in design specifications already mean that new coal-fired plants would, as I have said, emit approximately 20 per cent. less carbon dioxide than older coal-fired power stations. Moreover, CCS offers the possibility of still further reductions; there is potential for a reduction of up to 90 per cent. in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel-burning power generation.
	I hope that the combination of these arguments—the duplication of the effect of the EU ETS cap; the possible undesired impact on the development of CCS, and the energy security concerns it raises; and the actions we are taking to promote CCS technology—are sufficient to persuade the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker) not to press new clause 11 to a Division.

Gregory Barker: Anyone who has heard me speak about climate change will know that my party has long recognised that the benefits of moving to a more efficient, low-carbon economy extend far beyond just stabilising our global climate. Shifting to a low-carbon economy will also mean saving ordinary people money by making their homes, and even their businesses, more energy-efficient.
	That is why I wish to speak in support of the Government's amendments to the Electricity Act 1989 in order to enhance the role of the carbon emissions reduction target. New schedule 1, new clause 16 and amendments Nos. 45 and 51 will all receive the support of Conservative Members because we consider them the right thing to do. We wonder why these actions are so long overdue, but we welcome them nevertheless. As we debate this issue in late October, one wonders why serious action to stave off fuel poverty this winter was not taken earlier by this Government.
	I am also highly sympathetic to new clause 10, which was tabled by the hon. Member for Morley and Rothwell (Colin Challen), who is one of the House's experts in this area. His proposal to improve energy efficiency in the residential sector and in the commercial and public sectors touches on a vital issue.

John Gummer: Would it not be easier to do all this if home owners could see, at a glance, how much money they were spending on the energy that they were using? Why are we still waiting for smart metering to be rolled out, given that the relevant legislation is in place—if only the Government would activate it?

Gregory Barker: Sadly, I cannot give my right hon. Friend a good answer to that. Conservative Members have been champions of proper, real, intelligent smart meters, and of an ambitious programme to roll out that modern technology. I do not know why the Government have dragged their feet and will not heed the opinion not only of Conservative Members, but of Members from across the House that there should be a far more ambitious roll-out of real smart meters. It is regrettable that the Government have not taken advantage of the Energy Bill to introduce a more ambitious programme.

Paddy Tipping: I support the hon. Gentleman on the introduction of smart metering. He will know that discussions are taking place on that subject in the other place today. He talked about an ambitious roll-out, so will he tell us how he proposes it should be done? What will the cost be? What will the cost to the consumer be? If he has answers to all those questions, the House would be keen to hear from him.

Gregory Barker: I am not going to be drawn any further, because I am mindful of the time. If the hon. Gentleman would like to listen to the energy debate in the other place or read the  Hansard account of it, he will discover an extensive extrapolation of our policy, in which all his questions will be answered.
	New clause 11 is the provision on which I most wish to focus. It proposes the introduction of an emissions performance standard, which I consider vital if we are to meet the ambitious targets inherent in the Bill. Those ambitions are shared across the House, and support for new clause 11 extends well beyond the Conservative Benches. The Conservative policy enshrined in new clause 11 is modelled on the Californian example, which was introduced in January 2007. It requires all new base load generation serving the Californian market to have emissions no greater than those of a modern gas power plant: 500 kg of CO2 per megawatt-hour. By contrast, even advanced technologies, to which the Minister alluded, such as the new supercritical units proposed for use at Kingsnorth in Kent, will, in the absence of CCS technology, operate at the much higher level of approximately 700 kg of CO2 per megawatt-hour. Governor Schwarzenegger described the emissions performance standard as being similar to the standards set for appliances such as fridges,
	"where there are minimum performance standards and beyond that it is up to the market to compete, as long as they meet or exceed the minimum standard".

Colin Challen: On new clause 11, what level of kilograms of CO2 per megawatt-hour does the hon. Gentleman have in mind? If I recall, Lord Turner said last week that the UK's current performance level is about 450 kg of CO2 per megawatt-hour and by 2030 that should have reduced to 50 kg of CO2 per megawatt-hour.

Gregory Barker: Initially, 500g kg of CO2—

Colin Challen: That is an increase.

Gregory Barker: Clearly, we would look to push that down in the future, with the advent of technology. However, until we have the CCS technology on-stream, we would not wish to push it lower. That figure is a sensible middle course between the most ambitious target and the Government's target, which is—unfortunately—the least ambitious.
	Our EPS policy is clearly defined, transparent, non-discriminatory and verifiable. It would guarantee equality of access for EU electricity companies to national consumers. In his 2006 review, Lord Stern said:
	"Carbon pricing alone will not be sufficient to reduce emissions on the scale and pace needed...Effective action on the scale required to tackle climate change requires a widespread shift to new or improved technology in key sectors such as power generation, transport and energy use".
	It is the opinion of pro bono legal advocate Client Earth, in its submission to the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform carbon capture and storage consultation in 2008 that the Government's description of CCS readiness is a
	"a vague and meaningless definition that does not create effective incentives or requirements for private sector energy companies to make the necessary investments that are required".

John Gummer: Could not a deal be done between the Opposition and the Government on this issue? Could we agree if the Government gave real sense to what they mean by "readiness for carbon capture" so that it was clear that any new power station would have that technology when it became available and the money was in place? The fundamental problem is that the vagueness of the Government's position means that we have to stick to the argument that there should be no new generation without CCS. Can we press the Government to be more precise?

Gregory Barker: Regardless of what the Government say, the great benefit of our position is that it is clear: there will be no new generation of dirty coal without carbon capture and storage. The clarity of that position sends a clear signal to the market so that it can plan for investment. It is unfortunate that the Government competition has such a long timeline, is so vague and has no clear funding commitments. We are told that the funds available might be tens of millions of pounds, which is even less than would have been needed to ensure that the Peterhead CCS project stayed in the UK, instead of going to Abu Dhabi.

Barry Gardiner: The hon. Gentleman has been clear, and it is right that we have clarity on this issue. Will he be equally clear about the consequences of adopting such a position? If new generation capacity without CCS were ruled out, it is possible that, as old stations ceased generating, we would not have enough supply to meet domestic and industrial need. Does he accept that that is a clear possible consequence of his amendments?

Gregory Barker: No, I do not, and certainly that would not happen under a Conservative Government. The Government may have a one golf club policy on the energy economy, but we would look at a range of instruments to ensure a balanced and secure energy economy. We see CCS not as a way of ruling out coal in the future, but as driving forward an agenda that will ensure that we can use the UK's coal reserves and reach our 2020 CO2 emission targets. We are more ambitious and more clear-sighted than the Government, and if we ruled out a new generation of dirty coal, we would have to have a range of policies across the energy economy. If the hon. Gentleman waits until the new year, we will unveil our climate change strategy papers and he will see the stark contrast between the Government's one-club golfing and doom and gloom-mongering, and our wide-ranging energy horizon.

David Heathcoat-Amory: Does my hon. Friend intend to accompany his proposals with a cost-benefit analysis to ensure that these mandated low-emission power stations are the best way of achieving a lower carbon emitting economy? Otherwise, we could be loading more expensive plant and higher electricity prices on British industry during a very deep recession. How confident is he that his proposals, which could be written into statute, would be the best way to achieve a lower emission economy?

Gregory Barker: I have to be frank with my right hon. Friend—without carbon capture and storage, we will not meet our targets. If we cannot decarbonise the electricity sector in the UK and elsewhere in the world, the chances of being able to meet our CO2 targets in the next couple of decades are very slim. It is by no means the only policy tool at our disposal, but it is one that we cannot afford to throw away. He is right to say that the costs will be considerable—hundreds of millions of pounds, and perhaps even billions of pounds—but this policy would be a good use of the auctioned ETS credits that will accrue in 2012, recycling them back into the energy sector to fund research and development and innovation for UK plc. Unfortunately, the Government are sitting on their hands and have no credible policy not only on implementing CCS, but for funding or developing it.
	I contrast the vagueness of the Government's unambitious policy—we can hope that that might change with the new Department and there will be an announcement in due course—with the clear policies articulated in June by the Leader of the Opposition, when he announced that the Conservative party in government would introduce an EPS standard for all electricity generated in the UK.

Steve Webb: We support the hon. Gentleman's proposal, but the Minister's response was that if emissions are capped within a cap and trade scheme, the only effect would be to produce slack somewhere else. My answer is that we should also lower the cap at the same time: is that the hon. Gentleman's position?

Gregory Barker: I cannot give the hon. Gentleman a definitive answer on what the cap should be in 2012, but his general point is correct. We see CCS not as an alternative to the ETS, but as a complementary policy. The whole point of an emissions trading scheme is that it drives technological change. I am sorry that Ministers do not accept the verdict of Lord Stern—in a report commissioned by the Government—that
	"Carbon pricing alone will not be sufficient to reduce emissions on the scale and pace needed".
	Perhaps the Minister can say now whether she refutes those words. If not, I hope that she will join us in supporting an emissions performance standard that is the most market friendly approach to driving CCS.

David Chaytor: Regardless of the hon. Gentleman's comments about having no new coal-fired power stations without CCS, will he accept that new clause 11 would not, in itself, bring that about? It would set emission standards, but it would not say what those standards would be.

Gregory Barker: The hon. Gentleman is right. We have tried not to be overwhelmingly prescriptive, which is consistent with our approach to the Bill. We do not want to put specific figures into the Bill if possible, because technology moves on.

David Chaytor: Does the hon. Gentleman accept that that admission blows a hole in his policy on CCS?

Gregory Barker: Not at all. I have told the hon. Gentleman what a Conservative Government would do. We would follow the Californian model. When he sees the climate change strategy that the Opposition will publish in the early new year, he will get a full flavour of the range of policy tools that we will be deploying.

John Gummer: Will my hon. Friend come back to the point about carbon capture? Would it not be helpful if we could say to the Government that there ought to be a mechanism whereby, if they could be stronger in explaining how they were going to extend carbon capture and storage, it would be possible to have a phased introduction rather than this sharp distinction between the two sides? It seems to me that if the Government were prepared to be tougher about what such a measure would mean, the Opposition could, perhaps, come closer to the Government on the issue.

Gregory Barker: This is a very rare parliamentary occasion when I find myself in the slightest disagreement with my right hon. Friend. The beauty of our policy is that it is absolutely crystal clear. It sends certainty to the market and allows investors and the energy sector to understand that we will not countenance a new generation of dirty CO2-polluting coal-fired power stations. We want to engage constructively with the energy sector, which is up for this if long-term leadership is provided. Earlier in the year, in that leaked exchange of letters between DBERR and the energy companies, we saw just how the whip hand is with the energy companies. The absolute failure of Ministers and senior civil servants to provide any leadership means that we have to take back the initiative and show vision and leadership. That is what the EPS standard will do. A clear statement of our intent in this policy is vital in providing market certainty.

Graham Stuart: Does my hon. Friend agree that under this Labour Government we have had posturing on climate change while there has been an absolute and consistent failure to deliver the targets that have been set? To pick up on the comments made by the hon. Member for Brent, North (Barry Gardiner), who has just left his seat, there might already be a shortfall in generating capacity in about 2017. We have potential shortfalls in energy generation and a failure to commit to cleaning up new coal when it comes on stream.

Gregory Barker: My hon. Friend is spot on.
	Let me conclude on this element of the group of amendments. The ETS is a vital part of the drive to a low-carbon economy. However, unlike the Government, we do not believe that the ETS on its own will deliver enough. That is why we are on the same side as Lord Stern. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. Hurd) said so clearly earlier, the signals being sent to the market from the ETS alone are too vague, too fickle and too weak just to rely on emissions trading. That is why we need to introduce an emissions performance standard to give real teeth to the Bill.
	I am grateful for the support that the EPS has had from those on other Benches. We must give the long-term clarity that the market needs to invest appropriately in order to deliver a decarbonised electricity supply to this country within the next 30 years, through which many of the policies for meeting our 80 per cent. reduction target by 2050 can be achieved. Although we cannot vote on new clause 11 now, we will wish to put it to a vote later on.
	We are broadly in favour of the measure to expand the carbon emissions reduction target, but are concerned that the Government have made fuel poverty a problem for the industry to solve rather than taking initiatives to tackle it effectively themselves. If they had done something about fuel poverty when there was still plenty of time ahead of this winter, such as when we were pointing to the sharp rise in forward gas prices earlier in the spring, they would not be expanding CERT out of necessity at a time when it is unlikely to help anybody this winter. A fairly small amount of money per household is likely to be passed on to the bill payer anyway. Do the Government now see CERT principally as a fuel poverty mechanism or as a carbon reduction mechanism?

Edward Miliband: Both.

Gregory Barker: When the Government first introduced the CERT order in January, we were critical of it on several counts. The order failed to explore how, in targeting vulnerable customers, the energy distributors might readily identify that group without contravening the Data Protection Act 1998. It was an unambitious response to the scale of the climate challenges that we face and, in trying to drive microgeneration, tackle fuel poverty and lower carbon emissions, it might easily have been driven at cross-purposes. However, we supported the measure then and we will support it now, as it takes much-needed action to help the fuel poor, a group that has suffered particular hardship under the Government.
	According to National Energy Action, the Government slashed the budget of the Warm Front scheme this year by more than 25 per cent. for the next three years, leading to 50,000 fewer vulnerable households receiving assistance next year. The value of cold weather payments, which were introduced by a Conservative Government, declined in real terms over the last four years, failing to keep pace even with the rate of inflation, let alone with soaring fuel costs. [Hon. Members: "We've just increased them."] But over four years, they have failed to keep pace.
	Simple energy efficiency measures, such as cavity wall insulation and lagging boilers, will make the difference between life and death this coming winter. It is a sad testament to the Government's record on fuel poverty that today's measures, coming as they do at the end of October, will do little to tip the balance this winter.

Paddy Tipping: Will the hon. Gentleman at least acknowledge that the Government have significantly increased winter fuel payments, as has just been announced? More particularly, he recognised that the CERT scheme was paid for in the main by energy companies, and seemed to imply that that was not enough. What is his commitment? What is he saying? What money would he make available, were he in government, to retrofit existing households? How many millions of pounds is he prepared to commit now?

Gregory Barker: I shall come on to that question in just a moment, because I want to keep some structure. The hon. Gentleman is right that we welcome the expansion and improvement of the CERT scheme. We are pleased that the Government have chosen to take on board our concerns over the targeting of vulnerable customers and have provided for that support to be targeted at areas and groups as well as individuals. All fuel poverty charities tell of the difficulties in finding the fuel-poor and the further struggle in getting them to accept help. Street-by-street, postcode-by-postcode improvements mean that the most vulnerable will be lifted by the tide of change and lasting improvements to our housing stock that can be strategically mapped out to encompass those most in need.
	The new schedule includes the energy generators as well as the distributors in the scheme. That will significantly broaden the base from which the improvements can come and more fairly spread the burden of cost to the emitters of the carbon. By allowing the expansion of the scheme, presumably to facilitate the Prime Minister's September announcement, the change will empower the Secretary of State to use the CERT approach in a broader, but also more targeted, way. If that is done wisely—I hope that it can be—that can only be a good thing.
	Considering that the new schedule has been brought forward as a result of action on fuel poverty, I have some concerns about its place in a Bill whose priority is greenhouse gas emission reductions. I do not for a minute discount the fact that we need to act on fuel poverty, but we also need to be clear about the principal purpose of the Climate Change Bill. However, as the problem is urgent and in almost every case the ends are congruent, I see no reason not to support the change here and now on those grounds. To clarify, will the Minister confirm whether the Government regard CERT as a fuel poverty measure or a carbon abatement measure?

Edward Miliband: Both.

Gregory Barker: Some serious concerns have been raised that the costs of CERT will be passed straight on to the consumer, not least by the Association of Electricity Producers. That problem would be exacerbated by its expansion through the amendment, and it would be a cruel irony if this well-meaning step to tackle fuel poverty actually increased domestic fuel bills in the long term. Therefore, I hope that the Minister will reassure the House that the price increases will not be passed on to consumers and that, over the lifetime of the measures, she or her successors will continue, through the regulator, to be mindful of that danger.
	Finally, the Opposition are very sympathetic to new clause 10. Although the Government have done many good things during the Bill's passage through the House, we greatly regret that they have not engaged more positively on this vital issue. We hope that they will take on board the ambitions of this new clause, and the serious concerns that exist in all parts of the House about the need for a serious delivery strategy for energy efficiency. The matter is so vital that we need such a strategy now. We simply we cannot wait any longer.
	We believe that energy efficiency is about more than reducing CO2 emissions. In the modern, 21st-century economy, it will be as important to UK plc as labour efficiency was in the 20th century. Energy efficiency will be a hallmark of a successful, internationally competitive economy going forward. That is why the Germans are placing much more emphasis on energy efficiency and have a much more ambitious 10-year target than we do. More to the point, they have a far more ambitious and thought through delivery programme to make sure that energy efficiency becomes a reality.
	If the Government cannot support new clause 10 this evening, I assure the House that the Conservative party will bring forward ambitious policies to that end in the spring.

Colin Challen: I, too, welcome this Bill. It is a major step forward, and certainly a world first, so it is a great privilege to take part in this debate this evening. I rise to speak in support of new clause 10, and I also want to say a few words about new clause 11.
	New clause 10 deals with what lies at the heart of a great part of our carbon emissions, 40 per cent. of which come from the building stock in this country. It provides an answer to those sceptics who talk about cost only as a burden and not as an opportunity or an investment. We have heard some of that talk this afternoon but, if we invest in homes to make them more energy efficient, people will save money and we will not have to subsidise them so much in future through the various schemes that exist. That would be an immediate gain for people today, and not just for future generations.
	New clause 10 addresses three targets, and I think that I can claim correctly that all of them are existing Government policy, except that they have never been set in statute. The first target is that the general level of energy efficiency in residential accommodation should be increased by at least 20 per cent. by 2020, compared with the general level of such energy efficiency in 2010.
	The 2003 energy White Paper identified that a carbon saving of 6 million tonnes from residential energy efficiency is achievable between 2010 and 2020. An answer to a parliamentary question appeared in  Hansard on 10 March 2003, at column 11W, which identified that that saving would correspond to an energy efficiency improvement of between 18 and 22 per cent. New clause 10 therefore sets a target in the mid-range of that projection, and the Government answer makes it clear that the target is achievable.
	The second target is that the general level of energy usage in the commercial and public services sector should be reduced by at least 10 per cent. by the end of 2010 compared with the general level of usage in 2005, and reduced again by at least 10 per cent. at the end of 2020 compared with the general level in 2010. Again, a parliamentary answer appeared in  Hansard on 19 October 2005, at column 1054W, that identified that a potential reduction of 10 per cent. in energy usage in that sector was achievable by 2010. Another parliamentary question received an answer on 30 November 2005 that stated that the cost-effective potential of energy savings would be around a further 10 per cent. from 2010 to 2020. My point is that the Government have already said that the targets set out in new clause 10 are achievable.
	The final target in new clause 10 is to ensure, as soon as is practically possible, that
	"the number of dwellings with one or more microgeneration installations shall be eight times the number of dwellings with one or more microgeneration installations in 2007."
	That is not a vast increase in numerical terms, as so few dwellings have such installations at the moment, but the Prime Minister told the Green Alliance in a speech on 12 March 2007 that
	"we will provide new incentives with the aim of raising eightfold the number of households which are producers as well as consumers of energy."
	It is therefore clear that all the proposals in new clause 10 are existing Government policy. The Government have assessed the situation and said that all the targets are achievable.

Graham Stuart: The hon. Gentleman is making a very powerful case, and showing that all the elements in new clause 10 are Government policy. How then does he explain the hypocrisy of those on the Government Front Bench, who refuse to adopt it?

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. That is not a word that we tend to use in the House. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman would like gently to withdraw it.

Graham Stuart: I would be delighted to withdraw that word, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Thank you so much.

Colin Challen: Why is it important to set these achievable targets, and to put them into statutory form? We need to inform ourselves about what is happening today. The investment being made in insulation and other aspects of energy efficiency is struggling to cope with our stated objectives, and many manufacturers and suppliers of equipment and insulation materials are having problems. For example, Knauf Insulation makes plasterboard and insulation materials. It does not produce a poor product—the firm is actually at the cutting edge of the industry—but it is closing its factory in St. Helens because sales are not sufficient to keep the business going.
	I have also spoken to people in the microgeneration industry. They have complained about the to-ing and fro-ing—a sort of game of ping pong—that has occurred in the low-carbon buildings programme with the result that, from one month to the next, they cannot tell how much work they are going to get. When the terms of the programme were changed to reduce support for microgeneration projects, many people decided that the payback period was stretching out so far that they no longer had any interest in pursuing that course. It is therefore clear that we need to set statutory targets, and not just say that they are aims or objectives that have no force.
	In conclusion on new clause 10, I should tell the House that the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform commissioned independent research on microgeneration that was carried out by a company called Element Energy. The research found that
	"the underlying certainty and impact provided by a combination of legally binding targets and policies will drive the decisions by suppliers and their investors",
	and that
	"there appears to be a sensible logic for establishing a microgeneration target in the UK".
	That also extends to the other proposals that I have mentioned, and these are matters that the Government have to take on board. They may not do so in this Bill, but I think that we will have to return to the issue and strengthen our objectives with statutory backing.
	I want to comment briefly on new clause 11. The Opposition Front-Bench spokesman, the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker), weakened his case tactically by allying it so much to the fantasyland of a future Conservative Government's targets. The new clause already has cross-party support, but it would have got even more support if the hon. Gentleman had just presented it on its merits.
	It is perfectly sensible to set a CO2 emissions target for new power stations. I cannot see what the objection is to that. The opposite, of course, would be to permit anything. There are different ways in which such a target could be set. The Government could say, "We'll have a target whereby new coal power stations must have such an efficient combined heat and power plant attached that even without carbon capture and storage, it would be possible for us to approve them." It would all depend on the level set. I was speaking from memory when I intervened on the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle, but I listened to Lord Turner last week.

Desmond Turner: Does my hon. Friend agree that new clause 11 would not prevent, say, the building of the Kingsnorth power station, as the provision is dependent on the level set? The level set could very easily be one that a modern, clean combustion plant could meet without CCS. The new clause is actually a gesture without great meaning.

Colin Challen: Yes, that is true to a great extent, except that new clause 11 provides a power for the Secretary of State to set what might be described as a kind of licensing condition. That is a suitable power for a Secretary of State to have. Of course, a future Secretary of State in a different Government could say, "We'll help Poland out by buying some of their old coal-powered power stations and setting the limit so high that we can set them up here." In that sense, my hon. Friend's point is correct, but no sensible Secretary of State would do a thing like that. The provision is about reducing the emissions from generation. Lord Turner said that by 2030, we should be aiming for emissions of 50 kg per megawatt-hour, which seems an extremely ambitious programme. If that kind of aim appears in the Committee on Climate Change's thinking when it sets its budgets, this Government—or any Government—will have a real problem on their hands. A power such as that in the new clause would help them to deal with that.
	Jim Hansen at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre, perhaps one of the world's leading climate change scientists, has said that a complete ban on new coal-powered power stations that do not have CCS must be implemented immediately if we are to achieve our targets. Al Gore, who I think still advises the Prime Minister on climate change, is on record as encouraging young people to place themselves in front of bulldozers that are preparing to build new coal-powered plants. Of course, many such plants without CCS are to be built in the United States, unless new President Obama deals with the situation.
	We should think again on the subject, and not have a "We'll do better than you" kind of debate. A lot of people outside the House are expecting clear guidance on CCS. Of course, we will have to use it to deal with the Polish and German problems in the EU; there is a great dependency on coal in Germany. I hope that the Front Benchers will reconsider their total opposition to such a proposal.

Martin Horwood: I join others in congratulating the Government on getting the Bill this far, even though it has been a rather slow and painful process at times. I should also like to congratulate Friends of the Earth and its campaign for the Big Ask, and various rebellious Members on both sides of the House. If it were not for their rebellious instincts, I do not think that we would be debating this Bill at all tonight.
	In her opening remarks, the Minister highlighted the links between economic growth and carbon emissions. That might be thought a slightly unfortunate and perhaps tactless thing to highlight when we are going into recession, but it is quite an important point to make. In fact, Sir Nicholas Stern—now Lord Stern, but Sir Nicholas when he wrote his report—pointed out that the biggest carbon emissions reduction achieved by any economy over a sustained period was that of Russia in the 1990s, and it achieved that, broadly, by collapsing its economy.
	It is particularly important, as we enter a recession, that we keep all the signals, indicators and policy frameworks to decarbonise our economy in place, so that UK plc is best placed to take advantage when the upturn comes, and can have an economy that will take advantage of a new era in global economics and business. That is particularly important, and it underlines many of the amendments in the group that we are discussing, all of which we Liberal Democrats will support.
	Government new clause 16 and the consequent new schedule and other amendments are welcome. The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change said earlier, from a sedentary position, that there was no choice to be made between tackling fuel poverty and tackling carbon emissions. If we can find policy mechanisms that do both at once, we certainly should take advantage of them. I have to say that the proposals have faint echoes of the green mortgages that the Liberal Democrats advocated years ago; those mortgages sought to do exactly the same. They linked carbon reductions to tackling fuel poverty and very high fuel bills. Unfortunately, fuel bills have got even higher in the meantime, and it has taken an economic crisis to stir the Government into real action on that front. Nevertheless, the new clause is welcome, as is the Government's acceptance that targets for 80 per cent. reductions in carbon emissions by 2050 should be in the Bill; again, the Liberal Democrats have called for that for years. It is important to recognise the progress that the Government are making, and to support it. I hesitate to say, "We told you so," too many times—but we did, and we have been doing it for years.
	New clause 10 is also an important improvement to the Bill. As others pointed out, Sir Nicholas Stern said that the emissions trading scheme and carbon trading were necessary steps towards producing a decarbonised economy, but were probably not sufficient. It is important to grasp that point. The Minister talked about clause 33 in relation to sectoral opportunities, and clause 13 in relation to how policies affected various sectors, but the wordings are slightly wet. This is an area in which toughness and urgency are required, and new clause would 10 begin to deliver that.
	We need a host of additional incentives and policy measures, not least to give the clearest possible signals to the private sector. I have great faith in the private sector's ability to respond to policy frameworks. In my experience, given everything that I am learning about the renewable energy sector, low-carbon transport technologies and other environmental measures, when the private sector is given sufficiently clear signals, it responds brilliantly. A good example is the car industry's response to developing EU restrictions on carbon emissions, which are being flagged up decades in advance. I have to say that we Liberal Democrats would go much further, and would argue for zero-carbon new cars by 2050, but the emerging policy at European level is clearly sending the car industry strongly in the direction of lower-carbon technological innovation. My personal favourite is the Tesla Roadster, which is now on the road. It is rather expensive, but the emissions are only 25 g per kilometre. It looks quite like a Ferrari, and I would happily test-drive it, if anyone listening to the debate wants to offer me that opportunity.
	The white goods industry is another example of a sector that was given clear signals, not as part of some broad overarching general scheme, but on a specific basis, and in that case, too, the private sector responded well. Sectoral targets of the kind proposed in new clause 10 could play an important part in energising particular sectors. The hon. Member for Morley and Rothwell (Colin Challen) is right to want to give force of statute to targets that, as he said, were already Government policy in many respects. If we do not do that, there is of course a risk that they might go the way of other Government targets, such as the 2010 targets for CO2 emission reductions or the 2010 target for renewable energy; the Government have drifted away from those targets. We need the kind of pressure that is in the new clause to give a clear direction on issues such as microgeneration and the residential and commercial sectors. We need it to give businesses and industrial sectors the commercial drivers that will release investment, when those sectors can get it, and direct them clearly towards a lower-carbon future.
	There is an example in my constituency of which I am very proud. A very good but perfectly ordinary office supplies company called the Commercial Group has set itself the ambitious target of reducing its carbon footprint by 75 per cent. in just three years, and it is well on track to achieving that. That makes all the politicians' targets look, frankly, rather sick. That example demonstrates how well the commercial sector responds when it gets the bit between its teeth. I am happy to support new clause 10.
	One sector that might have been excused for thinking that it was a special case consists of the advocates of unabated coal-fired power stations. To say that the Government are giving mixed signals on that front is putting it mildly, and to call Britain a world leader in carbon capture and storage is like calling a penguin a polar bear. Since the Government proudly announced that they were a world leader in the field during the passage of the Energy Bill in the summer, two other countries, Germany and China, have produced working demonstration projects. As the Government were hoping to sell their more relaxed and gradual demonstration technology to China, that rather pulls the rug from under their feet.

Michael Weir: Is not the situation even worse than that? There was a project at Peterhead that would have put the UK and Scotland at the forefront of carbon capture. The Government withdrew their support, and the project is now going ahead in Abu Dhabi.

Martin Horwood: The hon. Gentleman is exactly right. The Peterhead project was a classic example of the Government sending precisely the wrong signals. Although the Minister seemed to disagree with this earlier, it is clear from talking to BP that the Peterhead project was stopped as a direct result of the announcements relating to the Government's own competition. That meant that the opportunity to use some of those gasfields for carbon storage is lost for ever, because once capped, the gasfields are almost impossible to exploit. It was a terrible decision, and it meant that projects such as the one at Peterhead, which would probably have been on line and functioning by about 2011, were stopped and replaced by a competition that was unlikely to produce anything before 2014 at the earliest. The Government have produced a carbon capture strategy that is too narrowly focused on post-combustion technology, too miserly and too unambitious in its scale. That is a great shame.
	If the decisions relating to Kingsnorth are anything to go by, it is clear that the current framework of the emissions trading scheme is, almost by definition, insufficient to drive us towards a low carbon economy. The fact that Kingsnorth is to go ahead when its carbon emissions will be 70 per cent. higher than the nearest commercial equivalent is almost proof of the inadequacy of the ETS. The Minister seemed to suggest that we should not talk about technologies that had to be retro-fitted more expensively to old power stations, while ignoring the fact that if Kingsnorth is allowed to go ahead without locking in carbon capture and storage in some form, even if it is only in financial form rather than in technical form to start with, carbon capture and storage will have to be retro-fitted to an old coal-fired power station. That is what Kingsnorth will be—a dinosaur from a bygone age—by the time carbon capture and storage is ready.
	Perhaps all this is a legacy of the Secretary of State's predecessor in the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform in its previous incarnation. The hon. Member for Croydon, North (Malcolm Wicks), as the Energy Minister was an amiable Minister to have on board in these debates, but he did not give much away and DBERR was clearly pointing in the wrong direction on such issues. Now that the new Secretary of State has responsibility for energy policy as well, I would urge him to add carbon capture and storage to the long list of welcome modifications—we would not dare to call them U-turns—that he is adding to Government policy.
	To say that the Conservative party had a slightly mixed record on some of these issues might be a little churlish in the circumstances, although I would point out to the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker) the failure of his colleagues consistently to support the Californian model that was put forward in an amendment tabled by the Liberal Democrats to the Energy Bill in the summer. He probably ought to look carefully at the voting record of the Conservative group on Kent county council on the subject of Kingsnorth, as well.
	However, the hon. Gentleman made clear his position today, and we welcome him on the increasingly crowded road to Damascus. He said that the Conservatives would put the greenhouse gas limit at Kingsnorth at 500 g per kilowatt-hour. If that is the case, he was wise not to specify the exact limit in the new clause. We would have had some difficulty supporting it at such a high level. Our preference is for a lower limit—to judge from the nods from some on the Government Benches, I suspect that others might agree with me—of about 350 g per kilowatt-hour, which would direct investors towards alternative gas-fired power stations if no unabated coal-fired power stations were viable.

Gregory Barker: I appreciate what the hon. Gentleman is saying, but we hope that the Bill will stand the test of time and that any figure, be it 500 or 350, with the push that it puts behind the technology, will be amended sooner rather than later. It therefore makes sense to give the discretion to the Secretary of State. We hope that there will be an ambitious and progressive Secretary of State, rather than the present hopeless and unambitious lot.

Martin Horwood: I welcome the hon. Gentleman's comments in that respect. As he said, the new clause gives the Secretary of State the power to define the limits— [Interruption.] The Secretary of State says from a sedentary position that he has that power anyway. In that case, he should support the new clause and welcome it into the Bill. There should be no dispute across the Chamber. We should make sure that we are giving the clearest possible signals to the industry and to private investors that this is the direction of travel, and that if anyone wants to invest in a coal-fired power station, they should factor in the cost of carbon capture and carbon storage into the future, or they would be misreading the investment opportunity.
	I am afraid that that is not the signal being given to the energy industry. The signal that the Government are giving at present is that the industry can get away with it, and that, as the Minister described, by going ahead with very high emissions in some sectors and allowing ourselves headroom within the European emissions trading scheme, we will effectively buy our way out of a high-carbon economy.

Paddy Tipping: The hon. Gentleman spoke about the direction of travel. What is the direction of travel of his own energy policy? He and many of his colleagues in local government are against wind power, nuclear power and new, cleaner coal plant. Does he want us to be so heavily dependent on gas that our source of power and our security of supply are at risk?

Martin Horwood: The hon. Gentleman has introduced an unfortunately partisan tone into the debate. However, I am happy to answer him. It is wrong to say that Liberal Democrat councils are against wind power. I have plenty of examples from Orkney and Shetland downwards where Liberal Democrats at local level have supported wind power in their localities, but I would never say that every application for a wind farm is always right. We have been committed to a democratic planning system, which always gives local people the right to refuse a wind farm.
	The direction of travel is more in the direction that Denmark has followed for a long time, putting great emphasis on community buy-in to wind projects and there has therefore been a very low level of opposition to wind farms in that country. That is a model that our energy companies might follow. The hon. Gentleman is right that we are against nuclear power, which we believe would leave a toxic legacy to future generations that runs the risk of leaving us with the kind of bill—the Secretary of State is smiling. I do not know whether he has done the sums, and I am not sure whether he has inherited the budget from DBERR for nuclear clean-up, which runs to some £1.4 billion a year. Fifty-six years after the first nuclear power started producing radioactive waste, we still have not found anywhere to put it. If the hon. Member for Sherwood (Paddy Tipping) is advocating that we make those same mistakes again, I would certainly reject the policy.
	We need transitional technologies to see us through any possible energy gap while we wait for renewables to come on stream on a scale sufficient to fill the needs of the whole UK economy. We should do that partly by investing in new renewables. The Carbon Trust recently produced some encouraging figures about how offshore wind is coming on stream faster and is likely to attract more investment than was previously envisaged. Another part of the answer is, of course, energy and demand reduction and energy efficiency, which must make a big contribution.
	The other key transitional technology will probably be carbon capture and storage. We need to lock in that technology, which is why it is so important to support amendments such as new clause 11 and give the clearest signal that we will not tolerate unabated coal power into the future. That would give precisely the wrong signal to the private sector and discourage investment in carbon capture and storage. As has been pointed out, that would mean that the projects would go ahead—but in Dubai, China, America and Germany, not in this country. I am happy to support new clauses 10 and 11 and the Government new clauses and amendments.

David Chaytor: New clause 10 is extremely important, and I endorse everything that my hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Rothwell (Colin Challen) said about it. However, I want to add a dimension to this debate. Proposed new section 2A refers to the sectoral targets for 2020 in respect of residential accommodation and the commercial and public services sector. My argument is that those targets could be more ambitious. In the past 25 years, without much effort, we have been improving the general level of energy efficiency in the United Kingdom by about 1 per cent. a year. In one sense, to call for an improvement of only 2 per cent. a year is very modest.
	The extra dimension of energy efficiency policy that we have to consider is the impact of the recent events on the financial markets and the global slowdown in the economy. The Chancellor and Prime Minister have recently been forthright in saying that they will invest to avert the worst effects of the slowdown in the United Kingdom, and they are considering bringing forward capital projects already in the Government's programme to alleviate the difficulties over the next year or so. However, ramping up the energy efficiency work that is already being done would not only be one of the cheapest and easiest ways of reducing our carbon emissions; it would also be powerful in countering the effects of rising unemployment resulting from the global slowdown.
	I hope that the Secretary of State will speak to the Chancellor about that because the Government have an opportunity to take an important initiative that other western European Governments could follow, just as they followed the Prime Minister's initiative on taking ownership in the financial services sector. The United Kingdom has a unique opportunity to increase massively the energy efficiency of its residential and commercial accommodation and of its existing public sector institutions and to upgrade the skills of some fairly low-skilled people to create jobs when the trend in the market is for jobs to be shed. I am reluctant to use the words "green new deal", because they have been a little overdone recently, but they are the best simple way of describing the opportunities on offer. That is why new clause 10 is so important.

Gregory Barker: The hon. Gentleman is talking a great deal of sense and there is a lot of shared thought across the Chamber about the importance of investment in green technology and energy efficiency as a response to the current economic crisis as well as for the long-term good of the economy. Has he had a chance to consider what the Germans are doing? He said that the 2 per cent. target was unambitious, and I mentioned earlier that the Germans are looking at 3 per cent. a year for the next 10 years. Has the German plan influenced his thinking at all?

David Chaytor: I am aware of what Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland have done, so I do not think that it is new or revolutionary. Nor is it idealistic; in the past 10 or 20 years, other countries have made far greater progress than we have. What is happening in Germany at the moment, however, is particularly interesting.

Graham Stuart: I have followed the hon. Gentleman's argument with interest. He has just said that in the past 10 years many other countries around us have made much greater progress in energy efficiency than we have. I wonder why that is.

David Chaytor: What I have said is that a handful of northern European countries have made more progress than Britain in many recent years; this goes back 20, 30, 40 or 50 years. We have a lot to learn from what has happened in some other northern European countries, but our progress on energy efficiency in the past 10 years has been faster than in any other decade in our history.
	I move on to new clause 11. I was interested that the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker) admitted that his policy that there should be no new coal-fired stations without carbon capture was not dependent on new clause 11. That was an important admission; it is important that every Member understands what new clause 11 says. It says not that there will be no new coal-fired power stations without carbon capture, but simply that
	"The Secretary of State may make...regulations...to set the maximum level of carbon dioxide that may be emitted per unit of output".
	Such regulations would be sensible. I do not know whether it is necessary for the provision to be in the Bill, whether the Secretary of State could make the regulations anyway or whether the provision could be made through an amendment to the Electricity Act 1989, although I suspect that it is not necessary to include it in the Bill. The sentiment and statement of intent are admirable, but they are not absolutely related to the question of carbon capture and storage and new coal-fired power stations.
	The hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle has worked tirelessly to give a green veneer to his party, and in some senses he has been successful. I have had many dealings with him in recent months in his new capacity as the shadow Minister, and he was formerly on the Environmental Audit Committee with me. I know that his heart is in the right place. The problem is that the mind of his party is in completely the wrong place. The hon. Gentleman talks about spreading around so much money on new CCS projects, but that is not credible given that his party leadership are still obsessed with sharing the proceeds of growth—when it returns—and giving half of it away in inheritance tax cuts for multi-millionaires or tax cuts on gas-guzzling vehicles. The policy is not credible.

Gregory Barker: The hon. Gentleman's Government have shot our fox on sharing the proceeds of growth; it is very unlikely that there will be any growth for the foreseeable future. In the light of that, we have had to amend our policy. However, if the hon. Gentleman had paid attention to what the Leader of the Opposition has said, he would know that my right hon. Friend has clearly spelt out that we anticipate significant funding for carbon capture and storage from the auctioning of emissions trading scheme credits in 2012 and that we have also spelt out where the savings would come for the funding of feed-in tariffs. The hon. Gentleman would also know of our clear commitment on the expansion of Heathrow. On all those issues, his party's Government are vague and our party is absolutely clear.

David Chaytor: The hon. Gentleman has just argued that at a time of economic slowdown, spraying away tax cuts is not the best way to pursue our climate change policy. The point also applies to the Liberal Democrats; just a few moments ago, the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) said that the Government were too miserly and unambitious in the scale of their financial support for CCS. His party promises to cut £20 billion from public investment, so it is hardly credible for it to accuse my party's Government of being miserly and unambitious.

Martin Horwood: I just want to put the record straight: that £20 billion would come from savings, not cuts to public investment. A great deal of it would be redirected to what we believe are the important priorities for people in this country.

David Chaytor: The hon. Gentleman means efficiency savings through sacking consultants—I understand that.
	I turn back to the serious point. New clause 11 is an admirable statement of intent. Few could disagree that what it proposes would be a good thing for the Secretary of State to do. However, I doubt whether it needs to be an amendment to this Bill at this time, and that is why I urge hon. Members to vote against it.

Graham Stuart: It is a pleasure to speak in this debate. Following the debate on the previous group of amendments, we know that the Bill will go forward aiming for an 80 per cent. cut in emissions in this country by 2050. However, we should bear in mind that aviation and shipping are growing at an enormous rate while growth in the broader economy other than in those two sectors will doubtless, according to the chairman of the Committee on Climate Change, have to be even greater.
	The Bill promises a lot, but it allows the Government to do what they have done so often. We have heard excellent speeches by genuinely environmentally committed Labour Members who feel frustrated by a Government who have so often failed to deliver on the ground the cuts in emissions and the change to a low-carbon economy that they have promised. The Bill is sending a false signal to the British people, because the Government are not capable of delivering on the targets within it. The hon. Member for Morley and Rothwell (Colin Challen) made an excellent speech in which he laid out with great care how all the components of new clause 10 are current Government policy. In fact, the Prime Minister himself has said that some aspects of it are Government policy. Yet when the hon. Gentleman puts it down in a new clause, we find that his Front Benchers refuse to accept it.
	I was not aware before this evening, Madam Deputy Speaker, that a ruling had been made that accusing Government Front Benchers of rank hypocrisy was unparliamentary and should not be done, so I will not do it.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. The previous occupant of the Chair pointed that out to the hon. Gentleman, so there is no need to have it repeated.

Graham Stuart: I stand corrected, Madam Deputy Speaker. I was searching for a form of words that my constituents down the Dog and Duck would think adequately expressed the Government's behaviour, but I suppose it would be best to say that they say one thing and do another.
	I fear that this Bill is like a conjuring trick that people follow with their eyes. So many people, from Friends of the Earth to many others who genuinely care about this issue, have bought into the idea that the Government are going to take action on it and set down in law the 2050 target, but we need to look at what the Government have actually done. The hon. Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) referred to energy efficiency. That is an area where it is cost-beneficial to the economy to deliver energy efficiency because it serves the purpose of benefiting social justice, but where we have lagged—pardon the pun—behind our neighbours.
	Earlier this year, the Sustainable Development Commission, which has the job of monitoring Government, reported to the Environmental Audit Committee that nearly two thirds of central Government Departments are still not on track to meet the target of reducing carbon emissions from their own centrally held offices by 12.5 per cent. by 2010. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was more than halfway down the list. The central Government agency that previously led on climate change has failed to deliver these changes in its own offices in buildings that we can see from here. Yet we are supposed to believe that this Government, who have so signally failed to turn rhetoric into action, can be trusted to deliver on some long-term target about 2050. I am afraid that I have little confidence that they will do so. Policies are not co-ordinated between the different Departments. Instead of leading by example, they push for environmentally unfriendly policies such as new and unabated coal-powered plants or the expansion of Heathrow airport. As the Environmental Audit Committee has noted, the Government will miss their own target of cutting national carbon dioxide emissions by 20 per cent. by 2010.
	That is the backdrop to the Bill. None the less, I welcome the Government's late conversion to feed-in tariffs, for which the Conservatives have been pushing for some time. That will be welcome, albeit belated, if it helps to lead to change on the front line and we can copy some of the success of our north European neighbours.
	I support new clause 10, which was well argued for by the hon. Member for Morley and Rothwell, as it would give statutory backing to targets that are already supposed to be Government targets but which Front Benchers seem unprepared to accept despite the impassioned pleas of Members on the Benches behind them.
	I also support new clause 11. That is accompanied by a statement of Conservative party policy by my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker)—the belief that we should not be allowing the creation and building of any more dirty coal power plants. Looking ahead, there is a real risk of an energy shortfall from 2017 onwards— [ Interruption . ] The Secretary of State is suggesting that that is not the case. If he looks on the national grid website, he will see that it itemises that potential shortfall. Moreover, there are imponderables such as how long existing power plants can be sustained for and what is their efficiency and effectiveness in producing energy. The Government's inaction has put us in a position whereby we have failed not only to deliver energy efficiency, which would reduce demand, but to put in place the production capacity to ensure that we can be well served by it.
	The Conservatives, on the other hand, have said clearly that we would not allow any more dirty coal power plants to be built. When one looks at this country's historical skills and strengths—the presence of major oil companies, our history of offshore platforms and involvement in coal mining—in what better way could we give a genuine lead to world efforts to reduce emissions than by leading on carbon capture and storage? The Minister completely failed to convince anyone that new dirty coal power stations would be more likely to be retro-fitted with CCS than existing power stations. If the Government were serious about this, instead of saying one thing and doing another, they would back CCS and ensure that it was delivered.
	It is not only north European countries that have done a better job than we have. The latest Chinese five-year plan for 2005-2010 looks for a 20 per cent. reduction in energy usage per unit of gross domestic product. In a developing country with hundreds of millions of people still living in poverty, the Chinese have a greater ambition than this Government, who claim to lead.

Alan Simpson: It took me quite a long time to decide to add my name to new clause 11. My reservations about it were exactly the opposite of those expressed by the Minister. I do not think for one moment that it would prevent the development of any sort of new power station working to any sort of standards. My reservations centre on the fact that the new clause is based around the word "may", not "shall". We can argue about what different parties may do if they are in government, but as there is no "shall" there is no obligation to act.
	I looked at the Bill, and I found that a couple of voices were permanently ringing in my ears. One was the voice of my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris), who has legitimately challenged this House to say at what point the 80 per cent. target becomes reality politics as opposed to fantasy politics. It is not enough to set a 2050 target if we have no idea of how we are going to achieve it. The second voice that permanently nags me is that of Aneurin Bevan, who, a long time ago, said that there is no point in willing the ends if we are not prepared to will the means. In our context, the means have to be measurable intervention measures that set minimum performance standards, and perhaps minimum requirements, about carbon reductions.
	I have awkward feelings about the introduction of thresholds in the Bill. If we want to amend the thresholds, we will need to come back with primary legislation. If there is a case for thresholds, they should be minimum thresholds that would allow us to set standards that have to be met, but perhaps exceeded. There is nothing in the new clause that does that, and there is not even a duty to require those regulations to be brought in. Those were my misgivings, but running through the Bill is a recognition that, as various hon. Members have said, we have to be willing to define the route map to take us from where we are to where we want to be in 2020 and 2050.
	Having said that, there has been a degree of ungenerosity from the Opposition in their criticism of the Government's lack of imagination. I am pleased that we have this new Secretary of State, and I am really pleased that he was able to come to this House and announce that we were raising the 2050 target from 60 per cent. to 80 per cent. I was also pleased that he made a point about feed-in tariffs and the genuine scope for community-based energy generation. It is quite wrong to pretend that the sense of vision and leadership in his statements did not reflect a Secretary of State who could be quite transformational in delivering the 2020 and 2050 targets—I hope that does not damn him for all time.
	The circumstances in which the Bill has to be taken forward provide the Secretary of State with ammunition, which, three to six months ago, we may not have anticipated needing. The collapse of global financial systems has prompted leaders in our country and internationally about the need for public investment to deliver economic stability. Where will we find that? The answer, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) said, is probably to be found in a green new deal. That is the lesson to be learned from what has been done in Germany since 2001, and probably since 1990.
	I have done quite a lot of work on the way in which Germany has introduced its feed-in tariffs and the transformational effect that that has had. The one benchmark comparison I offer is that the Government have set 2016 as the staging point at which we will insist that all new houses are to be zero carbon, and by which we will be building eco-towns. But by 2016, Germany will have converted between 40 and 60 of its existing cities into eco-cities because it has taken a visionary approach to the scope for feed-in tariff legislation. We can anticipate that the Secretary of State will take an equally visionary approach to the same provisions when they come back before the House in another Bill.

David Chaytor: Would my hon. Friend accept that we have an opportunity to revisit the 2016 zero carbon target and bring it forward? That target was set when our ambition was to build 3 million homes by 2020—a quarter of a million homes, or more, a year—and given the state of the housing market and the housing industry, those homes will not be built in the next two, three or four years unless the Government intervene. Could the Government not intervene to boost the building of new homes, and bring forward the target date for new homes so that the energy efficiency is built in at an earlier stage?

Alan Simpson: I am sure that the Government could—and I hope that they will. For me, the most exciting point with which all the German political parties connect is that our future will probably be determined not by the building of the 100,000, 200,000 or 250,000 new houses a year that we may need, but by what we do with the 25 million houses that we have today. The scope for retrofitting holds the possibility of genuinely transformational energy and carbon saving economics. In Germany, that transformation currently delivers a domestic economic multiplier with a turnover of €30 billion a year and almost 300,000 new jobs a year. That is the sort of momentum for which I confidently expect the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister to provide in unveiling the new package of green economics that will drive our transformation in the UK.
	However, we cannot achieve that transformation without setting targets and standards as the benchmark against which we measure it. I therefore make a plea to the House: new clause 10, which covers sectoral targets, sets out some impressive ideas about Government responsibility for the public estate and from where leadership for that should come, but they will not be realised if we do not push them to a vote or a point of acceptance, so that targets are written into our commitments. The ideas become fantasy economics only if we will not take the transformational steps that define the route map.
	For all its weaknesses, I would rather the Secretary of State had a permissive power to introduce those regulations than no power. My preference was for a duty—for "shall" rather than "may". Whatever performance standards are set, I would prefer serious debate in the House between the different parties about what they should be to the current debate about whether we should have performance standards for new power stations.
	If we are not prepared to say to ourselves that there must be performance standards, how can we say that to any other country on the planet that intends to build a power station with no standards? That is not so much hypocrisy as inconsistency, which is out of tune with the demands of not only the public but the planet and our time.

Gregory Barker: Does the hon. Gentleman realise that he has made an incredibly powerful case to many hon. Members, and especially people outside, who argue that we cannot afford to go green during a time of economic turbulence and downturn? He has put his finger on it—not only are such matters important for the climate, but, from the beginning of the industrial revolution, innovation and change have been the engine of new growth. The most exciting as well as the most necessary new growth in the 21st century is in energy technology. He is right to point out that it is the responsibility of any Government to put in place the standards that we need to drive that growth forward.

Alan Simpson: I believe that absolutely. I have made the case on many occasions that we have possibly a decade in which to transform ourselves into a post-fossil fuel economy. If we have the courage to do that, the great benefit of our time is that we have access to the technologies that allow for such transformation. The reality of the current crisis is not that we cannot afford to go green, but that we cannot afford not to go green. I genuinely believe that the new Secretary of State is one of the people who could drive that transformation.

John Hemming: I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson) because, apart from the fact that I have no confidence in the Government, his speech contained little of substance with which I disagree.
	The Government's attitude to new clauses 10 and 11 demonstrates their attitude to the Bill. They resolve to be good, but not yet. We must therefore consider the direction of travel on the consumption of fossil fuels, of which the three main ones are gas, coal and oil.
	The Government clearly want more oil burned every year. The Prime Minister said that—at column 33 of last Monday's  Hansard. Tonight, we had confirmation that the Government's objective is to build some nice new coal power stations. The second law of thermodynamics constrains the energy efficiency, but the Government are saying that the power stations will not be carbon capture systems and that we will simply emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Those power stations may be more efficient because the engines are better designed, but the Government do not intend to try to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted. That leaves gas. If we are going to burn more oil, more coal and, one therefore presumes, more gas, we are not going in the direction of reducing carbon emissions.
	The reality is that we have to start somewhere. At some point, we have to say, "We're going to reduce carbon emissions, so we don't need more oil, more coal or more gas," and we should have a strategy for that. It may take time to change direction, but we cannot have constant increases in oil supplies, which is what the Prime Minister says we require.
	All our constituents are crying out about the increasing costs of energy. I happen to take the view that the UK has gone far too far down the free market route and that the European model is far better, which is not necessarily something on which I am 100 per cent. aligned with my party. The green new deal is an option. We have managed to find £50 billion for the banks, but what about £50 billion to sort out the energy intensity of gross domestic product? That should not necessarily be the precise figure of course, but the principle that we should invest in energy efficiency to reduce the amount of energy used and, by reducing demand, thus reduce prices must be the way forward.
	New clause 10 basically says, "Let's get on with it and do something," but the Government do not want to know, while new clause 11 would introduce a permissive power. I accept that "may" in new clause 11 should be "shall", but the Government do not even want that. They have therefore taken a very clear view: they are in favour of being good, but not yet.

Joan Ruddock: Let me first try to tackle some of the issues raised by the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker) from the Conservative Front Bench, whose position, it became apparent during the debate, was that we would have no new coal-fired power stations unless carbon capture and storage were available, which it currently is not. That is completely unrealistic. The Government are of course committed, as he says his party is, to long-term renewable energy policies, energy efficiency and CCS. However, we continue to need a diverse energy supply and we must take energy security very seriously indeed. Coal currently accounts for one third of the electricity supply. I therefore suggest that his suggestion of prejudging and totally banning any new coal-fired power station is completely unrealistic.

Gregory Barker: The Minister said in her opening remarks that she was not going to prejudge the issue, but it sounds as though the Government are now doing exactly that—prejudging it and saying that they will allow dirty, carbon-emitting coal.

Joan Ruddock: Absolutely not. There is no prejudgment on our part, but the hon. Gentleman is indeed prejudging the issue, and obviously takes no account of issues of energy security.
	The hon. Gentleman made a number of other points about CCS, as did other hon. Members, particularly in relation to the BP Peterborough project. [Hon. Members: "Peterhead."] I am so sorry—and I know Peterhead well enough. As I said, we are talking about a private company making its own decisions. Of course it would have liked to pocket Government money, but we need—and have agreed to have—an open competition, so that we can choose from among those companies that wish to put projects of that kind forward. Then we can choose what we regard as the most appropriate project to receive Government money. It is as simple as that. We did not force anyone to withdraw from what they were doing.

Michael Weir: Will the Minister give way?

Joan Ruddock: No, I will not give way, because I have too much to deal with.
	The Conservative Front-Bench spokesman, along with another hon. Member—I am afraid that I do not have the relevant note—also mentioned Lord Stern's advice warning that the emissions trading scheme would not make a sufficient impact on the power generation sector soon enough to prevent us from becoming locked into high-carbon infrastructure. We have in no sense ignored what Lord Stern said. On the contrary, we recognise that, in addition to supporting the EU ETS, Government action is needed to stimulate the development of a broad profile of low-carbon technologies, such as our action to facilitate new nuclear build and support renewable deployment, and the CCS demonstration.
	We also need to reduce costs, so that a range of commercially viable options can be made available to companies when they are looking at managing their emissions. We need to drive down emissions in sectors not covered by the EU ETS, which we are doing through our measures on home energy and transport, among other things. We also need to change behaviour. The Government are doing all those things, and it is completely wrong to suggest otherwise.
	The proposals on carbon capture readiness are closely based on those in the International Energy Agency's technical study, which was released last year. In summary, it mentioned a need for: sufficient land on site that could accommodate a carbon capture and treatment plant; a study of the feasibility of retrofitting stations for carbon capture technology; and assessments of the availability of sites for storing carbon dioxide and of how carbon dioxide could be transported to those sites. We have consulted on carbon capture readiness over the summer, and we aim to publish the Government's response by the end of the year.
	The hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle mentioned the fact that the Conservatives' proposals were based on measures that had already been adopted in California. I have to tell him, however, that there is no equivalent to the EU emissions trading scheme in California. That is why he is completely mistaken in thinking that there could be a read-across between what happens in California and what happens in this country, where the emissions of all our energy-intensive industries are covered by the EU ETS. That is why his scheme does not make sense.
	The hon. Gentleman also asked whether the carbon emissions reduction target was a fuel poverty mechanism or a carbon reduction measure. The truth is that we do not have to choose. The great virtue of helping people to save energy and save costs is that we can assist with fuel poverty at the same time as we produce further reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. That makes a win-win case, and we will continue to pursue those policies in tandem.

Graham Stuart: Will the Minister give way?

Joan Ruddock: No, I will not. I need to make some progress.
	I want briefly to refer to the debates on new clauses 10 and 11, and to the speeches of my hon. Friends the Members for Morley and Rothwell (Colin Challen) and for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor), both of whom have made excellent contributions to the debate. I acknowledge that the Government already have sectoral targets, and that they have programmes that are proceeding as we would expect them to do. We do not in any sense reject the concept of targeting or of having a means by which we can measure progress. However, we do not think it is appropriate for those measures to be placed in the Bill. It has been suggested that it is important for the Government to get on with what they have pledged to do, and I give all my hon. Friends the assurance that we are doing just that.
	We want to look at the kind of sectoral targets we would need, and to determine whether we would need different targets for different types of business, for residential areas and for different kinds of microgeneration schemes, such as wind, photovoltaic and ground pumps. We have sympathy with everything that my hon. Friends have said, and for the concept of targets, provided that we can consult on the detail of how they would work alongside our feed-in tariffs. I am giving the House that reassurance. We have announced on feed-in tariffs, and this opens up a whole new dimension in the debate. If hon. Members reflect on that, they will see that this is a way forward for the Government that means that we do not need to add these particular measures to the Bill. I urge the House to support new clause 16.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Clause read a Second time, and added to the Bill.

New Clause 17
	 — 
	Regulations about reporting by companies

'(1) 'The Secretary of State must, not later than 6th April 2012—
	(a) make regulations under section 416(4) of the Companies Act 2006 (c. 46) requiring the directors' report of a company to contain such information as may be specified in the regulations about emissions of greenhouse gases from activities for which the company is responsible, or
	(b) lay before Parliament a report explaining why no such regulations have been made.
	(2) Subsection (1)(a) is complied with if regulations are made containing provision in relation to companies, and emissions, of a description specified in the regulations.'.— [Joan Ruddock.]
	 Brought up, and read the First time.

Joan Ruddock: I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

Madam Deputy Speaker: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
	New clause 5— Company reporting of greenhouse gas emissions—
	'(1) Any company that is required to produce a business review under section 417 of the Companies Act 2006 (c.46) must have regard to any guidance issued under section 80 of this Act when reporting on greenhouse gas emissions.
	(2) The Secretary of State may by order provide that any company that is required to produce a business review that includes information on environment matters (including the impact of the company's business on the environment) under section 417(5) of the Companies Act (c.46) must include information on greenhouse gas emissions, and in doing so have regard to any guidance issued under section 80 of this Act.
	(3) The Secretary of State may by order provide that compliance with guidance issued under Section 80 of this Act will be presumed to constitute compliance with section 417 of the Companies Act 2006 (c.46).
	(4) The Secretary of State must make provision under either subsection (2) or subsection (3) before 1st April 2010.
	(5) The expiry of the period mentioned in subsection (4) does not affect the power of the Secretary of State to make further provision by order under subsections (2) and (3).
	(6) The Secretary of State shall, when setting carbon budget pursuant to section 4 of this Act, lay before Parliament a report on any changes to any guidance issued hereunder which the Secretary of State believes are necessary to promote the achievement of any carbon targets.
	(7) Any order under this section is subject to affirmative resolution procedure.'.
	New clause 18— Report on the civil estate—
	'(1) It is the duty of the Office of Government Commerce to lay before Parliament each year a report setting out the progress Her Majesty's Government has made towards improving the efficiency and sustainability of its civil estate.
	(2) The report must include the progress made towards—
	(a) reducing the size of the civil estate;
	(b) improving the sustainability of the buildings that already form part of the civil estate; and
	(c) ensuring that any new buildings procured for the civil estate are in the upper quartile of energy performance.
	(3) Where any new building procured for the civil estate is not in the upper quartile of energy performance, the report must state the reasons why this is the case.
	(4) A report under this section must be laid before Parliament not later than 1st June in the year in which it is to be so laid.'.
	New clause 20— Company reporting of greenhouse gas emissions (No. 2)—
	'(1) The Secretary of State may by order provide that companies of particular classes or descriptions must produce as part of their business review under section 417 of the Companies Act 2006 (c. 46) such information on greenhouse gas emissions as may be specified in the order.
	(2) Any company that is required to produce information under subsection (1) must have regard to any guidance issued under section 80 of this Act when reporting on greenhouse gas emissions.
	(3) The Secretary of State may by order provide that compliance with guidance issued under section 80 of this Act will be presumed to constitute compliance with section 417 of the Companies Act 2006 (c. 46).
	(4) The Secretary of State must make provisions under either subsection (1) or subsection (3) before a date to be prescribed by order.
	(5) The expiry of the period mentioned in subsection (4) does not affect the power of the Secretary of State to make further provision by order under subsections (1) and (3).
	(6) The Secretary of State shall, when setting carbon budget pursuant to section 4 of this Act, lay before Parliament a report on any changes to any guidance issued hereunder which the Secretary of State believes are necessary to promote the achievement of any carbon targets.'.
	Amendment No. 16, in clause 13, page 7, line 26 , at end insert—
	'(3A) The Secretary of State must prepare an annual report to be laid before Parliament setting out the level of expenditure within the whole UK economy spent on efforts to achieve the targets fixed in the carbon budgets.'.
	Government amendment No. 44.

Joan Ruddock: The amending provisions in the group concern various reporting obligations on both Government and business. The key issue is the corporate reporting of emissions, which we have, of course, discussed before at various stages of the Bill's passage.
	Levels of reporting on greenhouse gas emissions in the UK are already high. Many companies currently report their emissions under the EU emissions trading scheme or will be required to do so under the upcoming carbon reduction commitment. We also expect that many will report on environmental issues under the Companies Act 2006 narrative and involuntary schemes.
	The Government want to provide as much certainty as possible for the business community and to show leadership internationally. However, we also have a duty to ensure that we do not impose new requirements without a robust examination of whether regulation is the most effective intervention to drive corporate climate change improvements.
	Government new clause 17 and Government amendment No. 44 are designed to reinforce our commitment to the importance of corporate transparency and to taking forward the process as quickly as possible. We will consult publicly next year on the detail of how companies' carbon emissions should be defined and measured. The outcome of that consultation, which will include close work with individual stakeholder groups, will be reflected in the guidance on measurement of emissions that the Government are required to publish by 1 October 2009.

Elliot Morley: I know that time is pressing, but I wanted to tell my hon. Friend that I greatly welcome the new clause. I know that the Aldersgate group, which represents many prominent companies, and non-governmental organisations welcome it, as does Christian Aid, which is also a big supporter of my new clause 5. I understand that the objective of new clause 17 is to provide for exactly the same commitment on companies as does my own new clause. I greatly welcome what the Government have done and I look forward to the consultation, a standardised method of reporting and clarity for companies on their carbon footprints.

Joan Ruddock: I am extremely grateful to my right hon. Friend for making those points and I assure him that we are very much trying to meet the spirit of so much of the good work that he has done on the provisions he mentioned.
	Government new clause 17 takes on board the strong views expressed in Committee that we should press for further action on corporate reporting. We therefore propose that by 6 April 2012, the Secretary of State must either use powers within the Companies Act 2006 to mandate reporting by companies on their greenhouse gas emissions or, if he decides not to use those powers, to explain to Parliament why not. This makes clear the Government's intention to move in the direction of mandatory reporting of emissions, provided that we can demonstrate that it is environmentally beneficial and cost-effective.
	The use of these powers—or the report to Parliament outlining why they have not been used—in 2012 must be supported by evidence of the environmental benefit, accompanied by a robust impact assessment and extensive stakeholder consultation. I hope that Conservative Members will take note of that point. Setting a deadline of 2012 allows business and the Government to have established a standard, while also allowing time for businesses to prepare. In recognition of the urgency of the issue, amendment No. 44 brings forward to 2010 the deadline for examining, on a strategic basis, the contribution that mandatory reporting can make towards our climate change objectives.
	I move on to new clause 5 and new clause 20, making clear the two key reasons for not setting a requirement for mandatory reporting in the Bill now. First, there is not yet a reporting standard on which the Secretary of State could base such a requirement. More time is needed to develop such a standard, which means getting all the details right. Secondly, many companies already report some of their emissions—under the EU ETS, for example, or under voluntary initiatives such as the carbon disclosure project. More will be doing so under the carbon reduction commitment. Once we have undertaken public consultation on the definition of the reporting standard, we will be in a better position to see what the gaps are between what is currently reported and what we want to see reported. We will then be able to design that requirement.
	Let me summarise what I have said so far. I entirely agree with those who have drawn attention to the need to consider the question of corporate reporting as a matter of urgency, and to introduce a mandatory requirement if we can get it right. I therefore propose to accelerate the existing timetable, and to place a stronger onus on the Government to introduce reporting requirements. I consider that proposal to be both ambitious and proportionate.
	New clause 18 requires the Office of Government Commerce to produce an annual report on progress made towards improving the efficiency and sustainability of the Government estate. The report will cover steps taken to reduce the size of the civil estate, to improve the sustainability of existing buildings, and to ensure that new buildings that are procured are in the upper quartile of energy performance.
	We are committed to including all Government Departments in the carbon reduction commitment, which will provide incentives for the introduction of energy efficiency measures and the occupation of more energy-efficient office space. Government Departments are subject to the "sustainable operations on the Government estate" targets, which are reported through the chief executive of the Office of Government Commerce and the Cabinet Secretary. The new clause extends those mechanisms by requiring the Office of Government Commerce to produce a report. It follows an amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Mr. Caton), and a private Member's Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Anne Snelgrove). I believe that the report will enable us to define the top quartile that was the subject of the private Member's Bill, and to monitor the commitment that was made through the introduction of energy performance certificates and display energy certificates. I am therefore happy to support the new clause, although parliamentary counsel have pointed out that some drafting changes would be desirable for legal reasons. I hope that all parties will support it if it becomes necessary.
	I am afraid that I cannot be as accommodating when it comes to amendment No. 16, which would require the Secretary of State to produce an annual report setting out total expenditure in the United Kingdom economy on action to meet the carbon budgets. The Bill has already established a new, transparent framework for reporting Government action to meet carbon targets. We are required to produce reports once the targets have been set, explaining which policies and measures will be used. The annual reports by the Committee on Climate Change on progress towards meeting targets and budgets must set out the progress that has been made, and the further progress that is needed to meet the budgets.
	It is difficult to see how we could be precise about how much is spent by Government, or the United Kingdom economy as a whole, exclusively on meeting carbon budgets, compared with expenditure on other policies and objectives. I think that the discussion we have had about fuel poverty is a good example, as are our discussions about renewable energy. Moreover, Departments already provide publicly available details of their annual expenditure in their departmental reports.
	For a combination of reasons—including the practical difficulties of accurately defining expenditure to meet carbon budgets, the level of scrutiny to which each Department's expenditure is already subject, and the Bill's existing provisions for the publishing of information about Government action of meet carbon budgets—the new clause is not acceptable to the Government. I very much hope that my hon. Friend will understand our reasons, and that, while recognising our support for all the hard work that he has done on all aspects of climate change throughout the Bill's passage, he will be willing not to press his amendment to a Division.

Gregory Barker: We are disappointed that the Government have not shown greater leadership and urgency on the issue of mandatory corporate reporting. There is, however, much in the rest of this group of new clauses and amendments of which we are in favour. For instance, Government amendment No. 44 brings forward the Secretary of State's reporting date by one year, which is extremely sensible.
	On the issue of mandatory reporting, we feel that the Government ought to take a real lead. Simply introducing a measure that allows at least four years—nearly as long as the entire duration of the second world war—before we can reach a point at which we will, or perhaps will not, introduce mandatory corporate reporting is not good enough. There was a good deal of merit in new clause 5, but we believe that there is a strong case for allowing the leading group of companies—perhaps a small group such as the FTSE 350, the majority of whose members already report their carbon emissions—to lead on a set of standards.
	We have to accept that internationally accepted accounting standards are already changed regularly. It seems that we are allowing the perfect to become the enemy of the good. We would like Britain to start to blaze a trail by allowing our leading companies to have a clear and defined role, but the Government are failing to give that leadership.
	 It being Nine o'clock, Madam Deputy Speaker  put forthwith the Question already proposed from the Chair, pursuant to Order [9 June].
	 Clause read the Second time, and added to the Bill.
	Madam Deputy Speaker then put the Questions necessary to dispose of the business to be concluded at that hour.

New Clause 11
	 — 
	Greenhouse gas emissions performance standard (electricity generating stations)

'(1) The Secretary of State may make provision by regulations for a greenhouse gas emissions performance standard to set the maximum level of carbon dioxide that may be emitted per unit of output by any generating station requiring consent for construction or extension under section 36 of the Electricity Act 1989 (c.29).
	(2) Regulations made under subsection (1) may include provision—
	(a) specifying how proposed generation stations are able to comply with any greenhouse gas emissions performance standard, and to demonstrate compliance with any regulations made under this section, including by the capture of carbon dioxide at the generating station and its transport to and injection into geological storage provided that such activities are licensed in accordance with applicable laws and regulations;
	(b) specifying the basis on which emissions of greenhouse gases from combined heat and power generating stations shall be calculated such that the unit of output includes useful heat produced in addition to electricity generated by any such generating station;
	(c) specifying any sources of electricity generation, including electricity generated from renewable sources, that are deemed to be compliant with any greenhouse gas emissions performance standard.
	(3) No consent shall be granted under section 36 of the Electricity Act 1989 for any generating station that does not comply with regulations made under subsection (1).
	(4) Before making regulations under subsection (1) (including setting the level of the greenhouse gas emissions performance standard), the Secretary of State must consult such persons as are likely to be affected by or have an interest in the regulations.
	(5) Regulations made under subsection (1) shall be made by statutory instrument, which may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before, and approved by resolution of, each House of Parliament.
	(6) In this section—
	"greenhouse gas emissions performance standard" means a standard prescribed by regulations setting the maximum level of carbon dioxide that may be emitted per unit of output from an individual generating station.'.— [Gregory Barker.]
	 Brought up and read the First time.
	 Question put, That the clause be added to the Bill.
	 The House divided: Ayes 202, Noes 280.

Question accordingly negatived.

New Clause 14
	 — 
	International aviation and shipping emissions

'(1) The Secretary of State shall lay before Parliament a report including—
	(a) a projection of the level of emissions he expects to arise from international aviation and shipping which are the result of UK economic activity,
	(b) an explanation of the methodology used to make this emissions projection, and
	(c) the way in which any carbon budgets have been adjusted to take account of such projections.
	(2) When making the above projection, the Secretary of State shall have regard to international carbon reporting practice.
	(3) The projection shall cover any year for which a carbon budget has been set, and may include any other years that the Secretary of State considers appropriate.'.— [Steve Webb.]
	 Brought up , and read the First time.
	 Question put, That the clause be added to the Bill:—
	 The House divided: Ayes 62, Noes 280.

Question accordingly negatived.

New Clause 18
	 — 
	Report on the civil estate

'(1) It is the duty of the Office of Government Commerce to lay before Parliament each year a report setting out the progress Her Majesty's Government has made towards improving the efficiency and sustainability of its civil estate.
	(2) The report must include the progress made towards—
	(a) reducing the size of the civil estate;
	(b) improving the sustainability of the buildings that already form part of the civil estate; and
	(c) ensuring that any new buildings procured for the civil estate are in the upper quartile of energy performance.
	(3) Where any new building procured for the civil estate is not in the upper quartile of energy performance, the report must state the reasons why this is the case.
	(4) A report under this section must be laid before Parliament not later than 1st June in the year in which it is to be so laid.'.— [Joan Ruddock.]
	 Brought up, read the First time and added to the Bill.
	 Question put, That Government amendments Nos. 1, 28 to 31, 72 and 32 to 47 be made.
	 The House divided: Ayes 476, Noes 5.

Question accordingly agreed to.

Clause 1
	 — 
	The target for 2050

Amendment s made: No. 1, page 1, line 6, leave out '60%' and insert '80%'.
	No. 28, page 1, line 7, leave out subsection (2) and insert—
	'(2) "The 1990 baseline" means the aggregate amount of—
	(a) net UK emissions of carbon dioxide for that year, and
	(b) net UK emissions of each of the other targeted greenhouse gases for the year that is the base year for that gas.'.— [Joan Ruddock.]

Clause 2
	 — 
	Amendment of 2050 target or baseline year

Amendment made: No. 29, page 2, line 18, leave out from 'since' to end of line 20 and insert 'the passing of this Act;'.— [Joan Ruddock.]

Clause 5
	 — 
	Level of carbon budgets

Amendment made: No. 30, page 4, line 4, at end insert—
	'(4) For the purposes of subsection (1)(a) there shall be left out of account—
	(a) so much of the carbon budget for the budgetary period including the year 2020 as the Secretary of State may determine relates to targeted greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide, and
	(b) so much of the 1990 baseline as is attributable to targeted greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide.'.— [Joan Ruddock.]

Clause 6
	 — 
	Amendment of target percentages

Amendment made: No. 31, page 4, line 31, at end insert—
	'( ) The power conferred by this section to amend the percentage in section 5(1)(a) includes power to amend or repeal section 5(4) (which directs that targeted greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide are to be left out of account for the purposes of that provision).'.— [Joan Ruddock.]

Clause 10
	 — 
	Matters to be taken into account in connection with carbon budgets

Amendment made: No. 72, page 6, line 26, at end insert—
	'(i) the emissions of greenhouse gases from international aviation or international shipping that the Secretary of State expects to arise during the budget period.'.— [Joan Ruddock.]

Clause 15
	 — 
	Annual statement of UK emissions

Amendment s made: No. 32, page 8, line 32, leave out 'each targeted greenhouse gas' and insert 'carbon dioxide'.
	No. 33, page 8, line 33, after '1990,' insert—
	'( ) the amount of net UK emissions of each targeted greenhouse gas other than carbon dioxide for the year that is the base year for that gas,'.— [Joan Ruddock.]

Clause 23
	 — 
	Targeted greenhouse gases

Amendment made: No. 34, page 12, line 25, after 'dioxide,' insert—
	'( ) methane,
	( ) nitrous oxide,
	( ) hydrofluorocarbons,
	( ) perfluorocarbons,
	( ) sulphur hexafluoride,'.— [Joan Ruddock.]

Clause 24
	 — 
	Base years for Targeted Greenhouse gases other than CO2

Amendment made: No. 35, page 13, line 3, leave out subsections (1) and (2) and insert—
	'(1) The base years for the purposes of this Act for targeted greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide are—
	
		
			  Gas  Base year 
			 Methane 1990 
			 nitrous oxide 1990 
			 Hydrofluorocarbons 1995 
			 Perfluorocarbons 1995 
			 sulphur hexafluoride 1995 
		
	
	(1A) The Secretary of State may make provision by order amending the table in subsection (1) so as to—
	(a) specify the base year for a gas designated as a targeted greenhouse gas by order under section 23(1), or
	(b) specify a different base year from that for the time being specified in relation to any targeted greenhouse gas other than carbon dioxide.
	(1B) An order may—
	(a) designate a particular base year, or
	(b) designate a number of base years and provide that the average amount of net UK emissions of a gas for those years is to be treated for the purposes of this Act as the amount of net UK emissions for the base year.
	(1C) The power in subsection (1A)(b) may only be exercised if it appears to the Secretary of State that there have been significant developments in European or international law or policy that make it appropriate to do so.'.— [Joan Ruddock.]

Clause 29
	 — 
	Emissions from international aviation or international shipping

Amendments made: No. 36, page 16, line 4, leave out from second 'the' to end of line 5 and insert
	'expiry of the period ending with 31st December 2012'.
	No. 37, page 16, line 25, leave out 'the 1990 baseline in relation to those periods' and insert
	'UK emissions of that gas for the year that is the base year for that gas'.
	No. 38, page 16, line 30, leave out 'taken into account as if part of the 1990 baseline' and insert
	'treated for the purposes of this Act as UK emissions of that gas for the year that is the base year for that gas'.
	No. 39, page 16, line 30, at end insert—
	'( ) For the purposes of this section the base year for carbon dioxide is the year that is the baseline year for the purposes of this Part.'.— [Joan Ruddock.]

Clause 32
	 — 
	Advice on level of 2050 target

Amendment made: No. 40, page 17, line 17, leave out 'before' and insert 'not later than'.— [Joan Ruddock.]

Clause 33
	 — 
	Advice in connection with carbon budgets

Amendment made: No. 41, page 18, line 13, leave out 'before' and insert 'not later than'.— [Joan Ruddock.]

Clause 39
	 — 
	Powers to give guidance

Amendment made: No. 42, page 20, line 26, at end insert—
	'( ) section (Advice in connection with international aviation and international shipping) (advice in connection with international aviation and international shipping),'.— [Joan Ruddock.]

Clause 40
	 — 
	Powers to give directions

Amendment made: No. 43, page 21, line 10, at end insert—
	'( ) section (Advice in connection with international aviation and international shipping) (advice in connection with international aviation and international shipping),'.— [Joan Ruddock.]

Clause 81
	 — 
	report on contribution of reporting to climate change objectives

Amendment made: No. 44, page 38, line 19, leave out '2011' and insert '2010'.— [Joan Ruddock.]

Clause 94
	 — 
	Extent

Amendment made: No. 45, page 45, line 11, at end insert—
	'( ) Section (Carbon emissions reduction targets) and Schedule (Carbon emissions reduction targets) (carbon emissions reduction targets) extend to England and Wales and Scotland only.'.— [Joan Ruddock.]

Clause 95
	 — 
	Commencement

Amendments made: No. 46, page 45, line 13, after 'budgeting)', insert
	', Part 2 (the Committee on Climate Change).
	No. 47, page 45, line 15, leave out subsection (2).— [Joan Ruddock.]

New Schedule 1
	 — 
	Carbon emissions reduction targets

Gas Act 1986 (c. 44)
	1 (1) Section 33BC of the Gas Act 1986 (promotion of reductions in carbon emissions: gas transporters and gas suppliers) is amended as follows.
	(2) After subsection (1) insert—
	"(1A) The power to make orders under this section may be exercised so as to impose more than one carbon emissions reduction obligation on a person in relation to the same period or to periods that overlap to any extent.".
	(3) In subsection (5) (provision that may be made by an order under section 33BC in relation to the obligations it imposes), after paragraph (b) insert—
	"(ba) requiring the whole or any part of a carbon emissions reductions target to be met by action relating to—
	(i) persons of a specified description,
	(ii) specified areas or areas of a specified description, or
	(iii) persons of a specified description in specified areas or areas of a specified description;".
	(4) In subsection (13) (interpretation), at the appropriate place insert—
	""specified" means specified in the order.".
	 Electricity Act 1989 (c. 29)
	2 In section 6(9) of the Electricity Act 1989 (definition of "electricity distributor" and "electricity supplier"), at the appropriate place insert—
	""electricity generator" means any person who is authorised by a generation licence to generate electricity except where that person is acting otherwise than for purposes connected with the carrying on of activities authorised by the licence;".
	3 (1) Section 41A of that Act (promotion of reductions in carbon emissions: electricity distributors and electricity suppliers) is amended as follows.
	(2) In subsection (1) (power by order to impose obligations on distributors and suppliers to achieve carbon emissions reductions targets)—
	(a) before paragraph (a) insert—
	"(za) on each electricity generator (or each electricity generator of a specified description);", and
	(b) in the closing words, before "distributor" insert "generator,".
	(3) After that subsection insert—
	"(1A) The power to make orders under this section may be exercised so as to impose more than one carbon emissions reduction obligation on a person in relation to the same period or to periods that overlap to any extent.".
	(4) In subsection (3) (power for order to specify criteria by reference to which the Gas and Electricity Markets Authority is to determine targets), before "electricity distributors" insert "electricity generators,".
	(5) In subsection (4) (duty of the Secretary of State and the Authority to carry out functions under the section in a way that does not inhibit competition), for the words from "no electricity distributor" to the end of the subsection substitute "—
	(a) no electricity generator is unduly disadvantaged in competing with other electricity generators,
	(b) no electricity distributor is unduly disadvantaged in competing with other electricity distributors, and
	(c) no electricity supplier is unduly disadvantaged in competing with other electricity suppliers.".
	(6) In subsection (5) (provision that may be made by an order in relation to the obligations it imposes)—
	(a) in paragraph (a), before "electricity distributors" insert "electricity generators,",
	(b) after paragraph (b) insert—
	"(ba) requiring the whole or any part of a carbon emissions reductions target to be met by action relating to—
	(i) persons of a specified description,
	(ii) specified areas or areas of a specified description, or
	(iii) persons of a specified description in specified areas or areas of a specified description;",
	(c) in paragraph (d), before "distributors" insert "generators,", and
	(d) in paragraph (f), before "distributors" insert "generators,".
	(7) In subsection (6) (power for order to authorise the Authority to require the provision of information), before "distributor" insert "generator,".
	(8) In subsection (7)(d) (power for order to make provision for transfer of person's target to another distributor or supplier or to a gas transporter or supplier), before "electricity distributor" insert "electricity generator,".
	(9) In subsection (8)(d) (power for order to make different provision in relation to different distributors or suppliers), before "distributors" insert "generators,".
	(10) In subsection (11) (duty to consult before making order), before "electricity distributors" insert "electricity generators,".
	(11) In subsection (13) (interpretation), at the appropriate place insert—
	""specified" means specified in the order.".
	(12) In the heading, before "electricity distributors" insert "electricity generators,".
	4 (1) Section 42AA of that Act (publication of statistical information about performance of suppliers and distributors) is amended as follows.
	(2) In subsection (1) (duty of Gas and Electricity Consumer Council to publish information about performance and consumer complaints)—
	(a) in paragraph (a), before "electricity suppliers" insert "electricity generators,", and
	(b) in paragraph (b), before "suppliers" insert "generators,".
	(3) In subsection (2) (definition of "complaints"), before "electricity suppliers" insert "electricity generators,".
	5 In section 64(1) of that Act (interpretation etc of Part 1), in the definition of "electricity distributor" and "electricity supplier", after ""electricity distributor"" insert ", "electricity generator"".
	 Utilities Act 2000 (c. 27)
	6 (1) Section 103 of the Utilities Act 2000 (overall carbon emissions reduction targets) is amended as follows.
	(2) In subsection (1)(b) (power by order to specify overall target for the promotion of measures mentioned in section 41A(2) of the 1989 Act), before "distributors" insert "generators,".
	(3) After subsection (1) insert—
	"(1A) The power conferred by this section may be exercised so as to specify more than one overall target in relation to the same period or to periods that overlap to any extent.".
	(4) In subsection (2)(b) (power for order to specify criteria for apportionment of overall target between electricity and gas sectors), before "electricity distributors" insert "electricity generators,".
	(5) In subsection (4) (duty to consult before making order), before "electricity distributors" insert "electricity generators,".'.— [Joan Ruddock.]
	 Brought up, read the First time ,  and added to the Bill.

Schedule 1
	 — 
	Committee on Climate Change

Amendments made: No. 48, page 48, line 16, at end insert—
	'( ) This paragraph does not apply in relation to the Adaptation Sub-Committee.'
	No. 49, page 48, line 29, at end insert—
	'( ) A person ceases to be the ASC chair if the person—
	(a) resigns that office by giving written notice to the Secretary of State, or
	(b) ceases to be a member of the ASC.
	( ) The ASC may include persons who are not members of the Committee.
	( ) Paragraphs 3 to 5 (term of office) apply to a person who is—
	(a) a member of the Committee, and
	(b) a member of the ASC,
	in that person's capacity as a member of the ASC.
	( ) Those paragraphs and paragraphs 8 to 10 (remuneration and pensions etc) apply to a member of the ASC who is not a member of the Committee as they apply to a member of the Committee.
	( ) In the application of paragraph 5(a) by virtue of this paragraph, the reference to the Committee is a reference to the ASC.
	( ) A person who—
	(a) ceases to be a member of the ASC, or
	(b) ceases to be the ASC chair,
	may be reappointed to that office.'
	No. 50, page 50, line 20, at end insert—
	'( ) section (Advice in connection with international aviation and international shipping) (advice in connection with international aviation and international shipping),'.— [Joan Ruddock.]
	Title
	 Amendment made: No. 51, line 11, after 'obligations;', insert
	'to make provision about carbon emissions reduction targets;'.— [Joan Ruddock.]
	 Order for Third Reading read.

Edward Miliband: I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
	It is right for me to start this Third Reading debate by paying tribute to those who have done the hard work to get the Climate Change Bill to its final lap; I am thinking in particular of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who oversaw the Bill through almost all its stages. It is also right for me to pay tribute to his immediate predecessor, my right hon. Friend and brother the Foreign Secretary, who also had a hand in this. I asked him whether he could be here this evening; sadly, he could not. I commend the Minister of State, Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, East and Saddleworth (Mr. Woolas), my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary for her work today, and, in the other place, Lord Rooker.
	Let me also pay tribute to Members—

Peter Lilley: I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way, but there is very little time to waste on these pleasantries. Could he explain why the business was so arranged that we had no opportunity to debate the increase by one third in the emissions reduction target from 60 per cent. to 80 per cent., even though by any calculation that must increase the cost by tens of billions of pounds, and why he refused to produce a revised impact assessment to give us any figures on what the costs and benefits are, which means that this House is voting on something that it has neither debated nor had any cost assessment on to aid its decision?

Edward Miliband: I would say to the right hon. Gentleman, who is much more experienced in this House than I am, that it was up to Members to ensure that we got through the business. Members spoke at great length; he made a contribution as well. The House has clearly spoken on this issue. With five Members and the overwhelming majority of Members voting as they did, the mood and sentiment of the House is pretty clear.
	Let me pay tribute to most Members across the House for their work on the Bill, including Opposition Front Benchers for their support, encouragement and mainly constructive ideas, and to all those who scrutinised the Bill in draft form.
	There are three important things about the Bill, the first of which is its ambition, to which the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) referred. It will make us the first country in the world to enshrine in law binding climate change targets that are stretching and ambitious, as they need to be—80 per cent. by 2050. They provide a scale of ambition that will enable us to play our part, with authority, in seeking a global agreement in Copenhagen at the end of next year. As Friends of the Earth has said,
	"the world's first climate change law will also be a world class climate change law".
	The second reason the Bill is unique is the central role played by the independent Committee on Climate Change, which ensures that Britain's long-term framework will continue to be guided by the evidence, whatever the short-term pressures facing politicians of the day. We see that in its advice on the 80 per cent. target, as we no doubt will in its advice on carbon budgets, which will be published on 1 December. At a time when we face economic difficulties, it is important that we in this House not only continue to be ambitious about climate change but are guided by the science, and the Committee on Climate Change will ensure that that happens.
	The third reason the Bill is a landmark is its recognition—some Members do not like this—of the scale of the shift that will be required to meet our ambitions. That requires action from every section of our society. For our whole economy, the advent of carbon budgets will help to drive the necessary transition in the way we use resources. For the energy sector, the obligations on companies to meet carbon-reduction targets for households will help the shift towards energy saving. For business as a whole, the measures on corporate reporting recognise, as do many British businesses, that cutting carbon emissions is now a necessary part of doing business. For the public sector, we need to do better, and the proposals on reporting on energy efficiency and being part of a new carbon-reduction commitment represent a recognition of that.
	It is very welcome that these key features of the Bill—the ambitions, the mechanisms and the need for a shift in all parts of society—have commanded near-universal consensus in this House. As I said in my statement earlier this month—I think that we should freely acknowledge this—we know that the hard work to achieve our climate change objectives has, in a way, only just begun. We should be pleased about what we have achieved: a 16 per cent. cut in emissions since 1990 that means that we are one of only a few countries to be on track to meet our Kyoto targets; an increase in offshore wind that means that we have now overtaken Denmark; and a tripling of renewable energy in the past five years.
	However, we know that there is a lot more to do. That is why I announced the feed-in tariff last week, why we need to tackle renewable energy being connected to the grid, why we need investment in carbon capture and storage, and why we need diversity in our energy sources. We are determined to make progress not just through this Bill, but during this year, next year and into the next Parliament. We look forward to many years of support from the Opposition as we do so.
	I end by paying tribute not to those in the House, but to those outside it: those who saw the dangers of climate change and the actions that needed to be taken long before the politicians did. I pay tribute to the scientists who detected the problem, the campaigners who fought to bring it to public attention, the green movement that mobilised for change, and above all, the members of the public who wrote to us in record numbers, asking for a Bill that met the scale of the challenge. I believe that we have met that challenge. We owe them a debt of gratitude for making it happen, and I urge all Members to support the Third Reading.

Greg Clark: I regret that there is little time to thank individually all the people who have contributed to the Bill during its passage, both inside the House and out of it. I would like to pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin), who first pressed for the Bill to be taken up by the Government, and my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Mr. Ainsworth), who previously stood in my place. One of the things that he bequeathed to me was the expertise and enthusiasm of my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker), my parliamentary neighbour.
	This Bill has attracted an unusual spirit of cross-party co-operation in both Houses. That is appropriate, because to succeed the Bill must lay foundations that endure from one Parliament to the other and indeed, eventually, from one generation to another. By 2050, we will all be gone from this House—some sooner than others—but those who come after us will remember our names because it is this generation that will be judged on what we did in response to the challenge of climate change. That point was well made by Margaret Thatcher. Speaking of our duty to nature, she said:
	"That duty is constant...It will weigh on our shoulders for as long as we wish to dwell on a living and thriving planet, and hand it on to our children and theirs."
	As robustly as we support the Bill, I know that a few people in this House and in the country have concerns about it. Since we have not had much time to debate them tonight, let me make some mention of them. Some are suspicious that a purported scientific consensus reflects more group think than rigour. Others worry that the costs of action to our businesses and our economy may be too great. Others fear that the Bill indicates a unilateral, rather than a multilateral approach. Let me take those points briefly in turn. Churchill says that scientists should be on top— [L aughter. ] Scientists should be on tap, not on top. I agree with that, the way he said it—correctly. That is why advice to Ministers should be given in public through the committee, not behind closed doors, and it should be subject to the scrutiny and ultimate approval of this House.
	On the question of affordability, the Bill provides the Secretary of State not just with the opportunity, but the obligation to set carbon budgets in the light of the science and the crucial economic and business issues of the day. In any case, what is affordable? Is it clinging to a high-carbon economy and everything that that implies for our energy security, price volatility and the costs of doing business, or is it switching to secure, stable and efficient energy systems that put British business, particularly British process industries, which have long been world-beating, into the forefront of world innovation?
	I am a multilateralist. I do not believe that Britain should act alone, but this Bill provides for the Secretary of State to give leadership in our international negotiations and, at all times, to have the flexibility to ensure that other countries come with us. That is the crucial approach to our climate change policy. We cannot stand alone; we have to take the rest of the world with us.
	During the past 10 years, the Government have often operated without a long-term energy policy; they have dithered and delayed over nuclear power, and emissions have risen in the most recent years. We are not even certain we can keep the lights on for the next 15 years. If we have learned anything from that experience, it is that we need serious long-term policies, not the short-termism of the past 10 years. This Bill helps to secure that.

Steve Webb: The Bill is welcome and important, and the process of scrutiny has improved it. We welcome the fact that the new Secretary of State has made several concessions, or improvements, in the final stages of the measure's passage— most notably his acceptance of our 80 per cent. amendment. It is the first time that I have seen a Secretary of State's name added to an amendment that I tabled, but I hope that it sets a precedent, which will be followed many times.
	My worry about Third Reading was that it would become an occasion for slightly too much self-congratulation when, as the Secretary of State said, we are at the beginning of a difficult process. Many people asked whether the target of 80 per cent. was too tough and whether it was achievable. I believe that history will judge that it errs on the low side—new evidence and information suggests further, faster, deeper. I fear that we may have to revisit the targets to strengthen them to avoid the dangerous climate change that we are united in fearing.
	Although the 2050 targets have rightly been strengthened, the 2020 target has been left untouched. We have not been able to put that right this evening. I know that the Secretary of State accepts that the end point is all very well but that how we get there, and especially how fast, is important. I hope that the Government will revisit that.
	The other big concern that remains is the lack of clarity on the domestic effort required to achieve the goals. Although we have ambitious targets, many of them could be brought in without any decarbonisation of the British economy. Clearly, we should not follow that path and we would have welcomed some guarantees about that. I know that Ministers would have offered them, if we had had the opportunity, but it was not to be.
	Influences on the Bill have come from inside and outside the House. My hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) and I have benefited hugely from the expertise of Friends of the Earth and many other campaigning organisations. They may even have helped us draft the odd amendment.
	I am proud to have been part of the process of considering the Bill and I urge the House to give it a Third Reading.

Colin Challen: I would like to add my welcome to the Bill. It will have an enormous impact on the way in which we order our economy and how the Government work. I am not sure that many people have assimilated that yet. In this place, we are often accused of short-termism; perhaps we are considering the first Bill about long-termism, and that is a good thing.
	However, if our constituents experience floods and water lapping around their living rooms and we say that perhaps a wind farm is the solution, we will be hit by the sort of short-term requirements that all politicians face when their constituents suffer a crisis. The battle has therefore only just begun, because our long-term vision has yet to be sold to the public, who currently face other difficulties. In that sense, it is the worst time to talk about a long-term vision.
	I hope that we will vigorously insist that the Bill is given the means to reach fruition and that we do not hold back on budgets. Nick Stern has doubled his assessment of how much we need to spend to tackle climate change to 2 per cent. We need to examine the figures and ask all Departments to reconsider the way in which they order their budgets when tackling climate change.

John Gummer: The crucial aspect of the Bill is that it sets up a Committee that has a genuine effect on not only the Government but the Opposition. It will no longer be possible for anyone to give a short-term answer to climate change issues. We should all recognise that, if we dislike what the Government propose, we must have an alternative that will deliver the same end. We have never previously had that in British politics because we have not been in a situation that binds our successors. The technique of creating the independent committee is crucial to the good governance of Britain in circumstances in which the traditional mechanisms do not fit the time scale of climate change. The Bill is therefore crucial and utterly different. I believe that the vote tonight will show that our system is capable of adapting even to the biggest threat to mankind that we have faced, in a knowledgeable sense, at any time. I therefore believe that we should be proud to be present and voting.
	 Question put, That the Bill be now read the Third time:—
	 The House proceeded to a Division.

Peter Lilley: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Given that we are passing the Climate Change Bill, which is based on the supposition that the climate is getting warmer, let me point out that it is now snowing outside, in October.

Mr. Speaker: That is not a matter for the Chair, but it may be because the Almighty wants to make a Scotsman like me feel at home down here in London.

The House having divided: Ayes 463, Noes 3.

Question accordingly agreed to.
	 Bill read the Third time, and passed, with amendments.

Business of the House

Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 15 (Exempted business),
	That, at this day's sitting, proceedings on the Motion in the name of Ms Harriet Harman relating to Standing Orders etc. (Energy and Climate Change) may be proceeded with, though opposed, until any hour.— [Claire Ward.]
	 Question agreed to

Standing Orders Etc. (Energy and Climate Change)

Chris Bryant: I beg to move,
	That the following amendments be made in respect of Standing Orders:
	A SELECT COMMITTEES RELATED TO GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS
	That Standing Order No. 152 (Select committees related to government departments) be amended in the Table in paragraph (2) by inserting, in the appropriate place, the following item:
	
		
			 Energy and Climate Change Department of Energy and Climate Change 14 
		
	
	B LIAISON COMMITTEE
	That the Resolution of the House of 13th July 2005 relating to Liaison Committee (Membership) be further amended in paragraph (2) by inserting, in the appropriate place, 'Energy and Climate Change'.
	C EUROPEAN COMMITTEES
	That Standing Order No. 119 be amended by inserting in the Table in paragraph (6), in respect of European Committee A, in the appropriate place, 'Energy and Climate Change'.
	Departmental Select Committees are a well-respected, integral and vital part of the House's scrutiny of Government. Following the 1978 report of the Procedure Committee and their creation in 1979, they took over the role formerly performed, in a rather haphazard way, by the specially appointed investigatory committees of the House and the several topic-based committees that were set up in the 1960s under Richard Crossman as Leader of the House. The creation of departmental Select Committees is one innovation—or, dare I say, modernisation—that everyone has hailed as a resounding success. It has been the convention that each Government Department has a Select Committee to scrutinise its policies, its expenditure and its work. Consequently, whenever a new Department of Government has been created, there has been a consequential change in Select Committees.
	As Members will know, on 3 October, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister created a new Department of Energy and Climate Change. The Government have wanted to move as swiftly as possible to ensure the proper scrutiny of the new Department. Its role, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State explained to the House on 16 October, is to ensure that we have energy that is affordable, secure and sustainable, to bring about the transition to a low-carbon Britain and to achieve an international agreement on climate change at the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen at the end of next year. Members in all parts of the House welcomed the creation of the new Department, and I hope that they will welcome the Government's swift action to establish the new Committee.
	Part A of the motion creates a new departmental Select Committee to examine the expenditure, administration and policy of the Department of Energy and Climate Change. It will have exactly the same role and powers as other departmental Select Committees. The Government have proposed a membership of 14, but the hon. Member for South Suffolk (Mr. Yeo)—who is present—supported by the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Peter Luff), has tabled amendment (a), which proposes the reduction of the membership from 14 to 11. I look forward to hearing their arguments during the debate.

Michael Jack: Can the Deputy Leader of the House acquaint the House with the representations received by the Leader of the House on this matter and with the Government's reasons for choosing not to respond positively to them, but to present the recommendation that forms the basis of the motion?

Chris Bryant: I am not particularly aware that many representations have been made to the Leader of the House, although I have received quite a few representations myself this evening in the Chamber from Members throughout the House, and I suspect that I am about to receive another in a moment. I am happy to listen to the debate and see where we go from there.

Angus Robertson: The Deputy Leader of the House is right to observe that the Committee is important, and that it is important for all shades of opinion in the House to be represented on it. Will he confirm that the difference between a membership of 14 and one of 11 is that a membership of 11 would effectively mean that minority parties in all parts of the House would not automatically be represented?

Chris Bryant: It depends what the hon. Gentleman means by a minority party. Obviously, the Liberal Democrats are normally included in the concept of a minority party, and I understand that it is normally up to the Committee of Selection to decide precisely who ends up on a committee. In the case of the hon. Gentleman's party, that would depend on what was advanced by the Liberal Democrats. But, as I said to the right hon. Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack), I am more than happy to listen to the debate and see where we go from there.

William McCrea: I thank the Deputy Leader of the House for allowing us to question him. He said that Members in all parts of the House welcomed the new Department and that it was therefore vital for all Members to have something to say about the Committee. Surely, given the importance of this issue throughout the United Kingdom, the minority parties should at least be represented on the Committee. Why should the membership be changed from 14 to 11?

Chris Bryant: As the hon. Gentleman knows, the Government have tabled a proposal for a committee of 14. Two Members have already made the point that there are clear representations in favour of having the larger size, rather than a committee of 11.

Joan Walley: Can my hon. Friend assure Members that nothing in the arrangements for the new Select Committee will undermine in any way the cross-cutting function of the Environmental Audit Committee, which the Government set up to look at all aspects of the environment in an integrated, joined-up way?

Chris Bryant: I intend to come on to that point later. My hon. Friend is a very active member of the Environmental Audit Committee. It was set up as a result of a manifesto commitment by the Labour party in 1997 and we have no intention of getting rid of it or undermining it.

Peter Luff: On a matter of fact, the Business and Enterprise Committee, which I chair, has 11 members, and we have one Liberal Democrat and one extremely valuable Scottish National party member, the hon. Member for Angus (Mr. Weir), who makes a fine contribution to the Committee's work. A committee of 11 members can, therefore, accommodate both the minority groupings: the Liberal Democrats and the nationalists.

Chris Bryant: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his comments, and I am sure he knows his Select Committee far better than I do. As I have said, I am happy to listen to this evening's debate and see where it takes us.

Simon Hughes: I, too, am listening to discover the mood of the House. For both size options—for 11 and 14—how many of the places would the Government seek to have for Labour Members?

Chris Bryant: I shall have to come back to the hon. Gentleman on that. It is my understanding that the number is usually six, but if I have to correct that statement later after having been more suitably informed, I reserve the right to do so. In the end, it is for the Committee of Selection to decide.
	Part B provides that the Chairman of the new Committee shall be a member of the Liaison Committee. Part C provides for European Union documents falling within the Department's responsibility to be referred by the European Scrutiny Committee to a European General Committee for debate.
	All departmental Select Committees operate under the same system. There are, however, two Committees of the House that have rather different functions: the Public Accounts Committee, which dates back to 1861 and is the oldest of the House's Committees, and the Environmental Audit Committee, which, as I have said, was established as a result of a Labour manifesto commitment in 1997. That Committee, chaired by the hon. Member for South Suffolk, has taken the lead in examining climate change issues across Government and has covered wider topics, for instance through its highly respected annual analysis of the environmental implications of the pre-Budget report and its work on sustainable development. I pay tribute to its members, many of whom have, both personally and from within the Committee, led the debate on these issues, as we have witnessed today in the Chamber.
	Clearly, there is the potential for overlap between the Environmental Audit Committee and the new Committee that we hope to set up tonight, but that is nothing new. Both departmental and non-departmental Select Committees have always adopted a flexible approach to their terms of reference, which is a good thing as it allows for joined-up scrutiny free from the sometimes artificial boundaries of departmental responsibilities. Moreover, the Environmental Audit Committee is very much akin to the Public Accounts Committee, whose cross-departmental remit has not been obviated by the existence of the Treasury Committee. We are reluctant to abolish the Environmental Audit Committee, as we believe it still performs an effective and important role in monitoring environmental issues at a cross-departmental level. We would, therefore, like to wait and see how the two Committees work together before taking any long-term decisions about the future of the Environmental Audit Committee.

Michael Jack: Why does the Deputy Leader of the House think that only two Committees have an interest in environmental issues? The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, which I have the honour of chairing, has the job of scrutinising the Government's conduct in respect of the Sustainable Development Commission and many other associated environment issues. If the Deputy Leader of the House is to propose the case for monitoring two Committees working together, I entreat him also to include our Committee and thereby to make it three.

Chris Bryant: The right hon. Gentleman has pre-empted exactly what I was about to say. Clearly, there are other Committees that have historically had an interest in the matter, but that is true in many cases. For instance, in the case of the Communications Act 2003, there were two Select Committees that had a prime interest, the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport and the then Select Committee on Trade and Industry. There is constant interest in the House in ensuring that when there are overlapping interests, Committees work together rather than against one another.

John Gummer: Has not the Minister revealed, maybe inadvertently, that the structure of Government relating to the environment is, as we have always said, entirely out of kilter? This is an opportunity for the Government to think seriously about the situation in which three Departments are responsible for matters that most of us would see as being concerned with the environment. We really ought to reconsider how we deal with the environment. That would be a very useful thing for him and the Leader of the House to raise with the Prime Minister.

Chris Bryant: Tempting as it is for me to raise such matters with the Prime Minister, I do not think that it is a very good idea. Most importantly, every Member who spoke in the House about the creation of the new Department welcomed it.

John Gummer: indicated assent.

Chris Bryant: The right hon. Gentleman nods sagely, so I think that he was merely trying to set me a trap, into which I have no intention of walking.
	I should also mention the work of the Business and Enterprise Committee, chaired by the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire. I know that he will be sorry to lose his energy brief, as the Committee has recently done valuable work on energy prices and on fuel poverty, matters that are often raised in the House. However, business and enterprise remains a wide-ranging brief, and given the breadth of issues that the Committee has tackled in recent years, I know that it will continue to perform an invaluable service to the House. He has tabled amendment (b), which would delay the creation of the new Committee until January. If he feels that that is necessary to allow his Committee to complete work in process and to effect an orderly transition, I am happy to listen to his arguments, should he catch your eye, Mr. Speaker.
	Climate change has also been of interest to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, chaired by the right hon. Member for Fylde. I am sorry that it has had to abandon its inquiry into international climate change policy post-2012, not least because I know that he has a long-standing interest in such issues, for which many Members have looked to him. I have no doubt that the Committee's written evidence, which it has placed in the Library, will be of interest to the Energy and Climate Change Committee when it comes into being.
	The motion contains only the changes to Standing Orders that are necessary to bring the Department of Energy and Climate Change fully within the scope of the House's scrutiny arrangements. I therefore commend it to the House.

Shailesh Vara: The Opposition welcome the proposal for a new Select Committee. Select Committees obviously do a very important task of scrutinising both Departments and their Ministers, but, equally important, they have the control to be able to call to account other senior people in their areas.
	The Deputy Leader of the House was not very convincing in dealing with the questions asked by the minority parties, with which I have some sympathy. I look forward to hearing more from my hon. Friends the Members for Mid-Worcestershire (Peter Luff) and for South Suffolk (Mr. Yeo), who are Chairmen of affected Select Committees. I hope that the Deputy Leader of the House will provide more suitable answers than we have had so far.
	I would also be grateful if the Deputy Leader of the House gave a fuller reply to the important question asked by my right hon. Friend the Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack). It is all very well for the Minister to say that there will be a review of the Energy and Climate Change Committee and the Environmental Audit Committee, but what are to be the criteria for that review? How long will it be, or will it simply go on and on as has happened in other instances? More precision would be most welcome. Otherwise, the Opposition welcome the proposed new Select Committee.

Simon Hughes: It is intriguing to come to this debate from outside, where it is snowing, which signifies that something is happening to the climate. Some of us believe that it is right to respond to that legislatively—indeed, most of us agreed to do so just a few minutes ago. I am grateful to the Deputy Leader of the House for the way in which he introduced the debate, which is about the logical proposition that we should set up the appropriate Select Committee.
	My Liberal colleagues and I have always said that debates such as this should take place one step earlier, before a new Department is set up, so that this place can scrutinise whether it should happen. That picks up the point made by the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer). It is a Government tradition that the Prime Minister can decide, either after long thought or little thought, to create a new Department. Departments come and go and their names change, but the reality is that they may not be justified. We have argued for a long time that, if a Government, either at the beginning of their term or at some other stage, wish to set up a new Department, it would be far better if the case for such a proposal had to be made and if this House could scrutinise whether it was made well. It is possible that, on examination, such a proposal would be found not to work well. There is a debate to be had—we have not had it today—as on how the new Department, headed by the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, whom we welcome to his post, will work with existing Departments. One of those Departments has "environment" in its title and will continue to have environmental responsibilities, as will others.

Nick Hurd: May I push the hon. Gentleman back a little in his argument? Surely it is for the Government to determine the structure of government and the structure of Departments, but it is the business of the House to determine how those Departments are scrutinised. My problem with the principle behind tonight's proposal is that we are being presented with an edict from this Government on the structure of a Committee that is being set up to scrutinise this Department, and, consequently, the three existing departmental Select Committees, chaired vigorously by members of the Opposition parties, are having their powers diluted in favour of the new departmental Select Committee, which will, presumably be chaired by a Government Member.

Simon Hughes: I take a slightly different view from the hon. Gentleman. He argues the conventional position that the Government can create and dissolve Departments at their whim. I argue that it is for the Government to propose, and for Parliament to agree to dispose, in respect of whether the structure is right. The Executive ought to concede power to the legislature. However, when a Department is set up, the logic is that there should be a Select Committee to hold it to account. Given that we do not have the position for which I wish, whereby we have a say in what Departments exist, we have to take what we are given by the Prime Minister of the day and, thus, logically there are departmental Select Committees to deal with those Departments. That is the consequence of the current structure, though I would rather the situation were otherwise.
	Given the current situation, it is right that the Deputy Leader of the House has come before the House to propose the setting up of a new Select Committee, and that that Committee should be set up tonight. The options are simple. The first choice is whether the Committee has a membership of 14 or 11—that is why I asked him the question that I did. If the Committee has 11 members, the Government would expect to have six Labour places on it, whereas if it is a Committee of 14, they would expect to have eight places. Understandably, the Government would have a majority in each case.
	It does not necessarily follow that the parties from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would not be represented on the smaller Committee. I think that on an issue such as this, it is important that Northern Ireland, where none of the three largest parties in the United Kingdom is represented, and Scotland have representation on the Select Committee. The hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson), who represents the Scottish National party, knows that the arrangements are negotiated between us, but my colleagues would not wish to prevent Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales—I guess that they must sort things out between them—from being represented. That argument suggests a need for the larger Committee, rather than the smaller one. There is logic in ensuring that the Committee is as inclusive as possible.
	I understand the other argument, which has not yet been enunciated, about the increasing number of Committees. Indeed, Select Committees for the English regions are to be proposed in the next couple of weeks. Given that the Government have a majority, we can assume that those Committees might come into existence, and so the work load of colleagues will grow. If Select Committees with 11 members could be accommodated across the board and if such an arrangement could be fair, that number would probably be a better norm to have. That is because opting for a smaller number of dedicated people might stretch colleagues less across all their scrutiny jobs, across all the Standing Committees and across all the other work. Given that we have not yet had the debate on regional Select Committees for England, and that we cannot assume that that will go through, it is right to prefer a larger committee in this context.
	The other amendment would delay the start so that the motion does not come into effect until January. I do not know what the argument for that is—it will probably be put shortly. It may be to ensure co-ordination between the three existing Committees and Departments. That is a persuasive argument and the Minister could, at the same time as saying that he wants the motion to come into effect as soon as possible, be sensitive to the fact that many cross-cutting questions remain to be resolved. My initial instinct is to be sympathetic to that argument and hope that the House will accommodate that request from the Chairmen of existing Committees, so that the new Committee comes into operation at the beginning of the new year.
	We are keen that such issues should be scrutinised, as the new Department is very important. It is right to link the energy and climate change agendas, and we wish the Secretary of State and his colleagues well in their important responsibilities. I hope that we can reach an accommodation that will find most favour with all parties. With the exception of the Labour party, all parties are minorities in this House, and in the country all parties are very clearly minorities, including the Labour party.

Peter Luff: I beg to move amendment (b), after "Standing Orders" at end insert
	', with effect from 1st January 2009'.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: With this it will be convenient to take amendment (a), leave out '14' and insert '11'.

Peter Luff: First, I wish to recognise the courtesy that the Secretary of State is extending by attending this debate. It is greatly appreciated by all of us, and it is characteristic of him, if I may say so. His shadow is also in his place.
	Those of us who have the privilege of being Select Committee Chairmen attach great importance to effective scrutiny of Departments. It would be helpful if the Executive tended to consult the Chairmen rather more about how that scrutiny should be conducted, instead of presenting the House with a fait accompli. I certainly made suggestions to the Leader's office about the structure of the Select Committees after the creation of the new Department. The Government are, of course, at liberty to disagree with me—I have no monopoly on wisdom—but it would have been good to find out that they disagreed with me, instead of having to rely on a motion appearing on the Order Paper.
	The lack of consultation is disappointing. I approach this debate in a spirit of co-operation because I wish to achieve effective scrutiny, and I was disappointed that, having spoken to the Leader's office, I received no communication that the Government took a contrary view. It is also for the House to determine how it should scrutinise the Executive, not for the Executive to determine how it should be scrutinised. The motion therefore raises important issues of principle, but as I wish this to be a good-natured debate I shall put that to one side. It is just a shame that the approaches that I made to the Leader's office were not dealt with effectively.
	I also wish to record my support for the new Department. Energy policy is one of the most important issues this nation faces, and the objectives of the Department are some of the most important objectives with which any Secretary of State has to contend. It is true that I personally regret the loss of energy from the responsibilities of my Select Committee—I am grateful to the Deputy Leader of the House for his comments—because I find energy policy fascinating intellectually and politically, and it is of great importance. However, it is right that we should have a separate Department for energy in the testing times that we face, especially in the context of climate change and worries about global warming.
	I have concerns about how the Government have approached the setting up of the new Committee, and the lack of discussion with the Chairmen of the existing Committees, but I agree—with some reluctance—about the need for a new Department. It follows that we need a new Select Committee. This is a discussion of mechanisms, not principles.
	On a question of principle, may I repeat what I said in an intervention in the speech by the Deputy Leader of the House about how much I value the contribution made by the Scottish Nationalist member of my Committee, the hon. Member for Angus (Mr. Weir)? He is an outstanding member of the Committee: he is diligent, hard-working, thoughtful and conciliatory, as well as bringing a great deal of knowledge to bear on the subjects discussed. I appreciate his contribution greatly. I see no reason why, with good will on both sides of the House, Committees of 11 could not accommodate the nationalists' aspirations to be properly represented on Committees of concern to them. The idea that we need a Committee of 14 to meet those aspirations is misguided and misplaced. I greatly value the contribution that the nationalists make to my Committee and I wish to maintain that—certainly on the Business and Enterprise Committee.

Michael Weir: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his kind words. Does he not remember that when the membership of the Business and Enterprise Committee was reduced, there was a problem with maintaining my place on the Committee? As a result of the reduction, another valuable Member, the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone), lost his seat on the Committee. There was a problem, and it was not simple to sort that out at the time.

Peter Luff: These matters are never simple, and the nature of the negotiations through the usual channels—of which I was once a part, when I was in my party's Whips Office—are often complex. I do not believe that it is necessary to impose the penalty of a Committee of 14 to achieve the desirable objective of ensuring that all parties in this House have a proper say on Select Committees.
	The proposition that I put to the Leader of the House's office was that the Environmental Audit Committee, chaired so ably by my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (Mr. Yeo), should be replaced by the Energy and Climate Change Committee. I understand the concerns expressed by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, North (Joan Walley) about the manifesto commitment in respect of a cross-cutting Environmental Audit Committee. The work done by that Committee is overwhelmingly in the climate change and energy area, and it will create a difficulty for all of us who will have a residual responsibility. My Committee cannot ignore the issues relating to the security of energy supply, which are of huge importance for the competitiveness of UK business. We will not ignore them.
	I am sure that there will still be many issues relating to climate change and energy policy that are of concern to my right hon. Friend the Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack) as the Chairman of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee. Certainly, if the Environmental Audit Committee survives, my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk will have many issues relating to energy policy and climate change to consider. I fear that the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change could become the most scrutinised Secretary of State in the House of Commons, and he could be appearing before Select Committees on an alarmingly regular basis. The Government have not thought through the consequences of the change properly.
	There is already a degree of awkward overlap between my Committee and that of my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk—I say this to him in the spirit of friendliness. Certainly, one or two of my hon. Friend's inquiries have caused a degree of confusion in the outside world, in particular an early one on "Keeping the lights on: Nuclear, Renewables and Climate Change", which was published in the 2005-06 Session. Overlap already exists, but this change will make the overlap even greater and more confusing for the outside world. My preference would have been for the Environmental Audit Committee to have been superseded by the Energy and Climate Change Committee, but we are where we are.
	I shall come last to the substance of my amendment, but I shall now speak in support of an amendment that has not yet been moved. I hope that is in order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. On the thorny question of 11 members as against 14, I had the privilege of chairing what was then the Select Committee on Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform—which before that was the Select Committee on Trade and Industry—when it had 14 members. That is not a manageable number. It does not permit effective collegiate working of the Committee. It is too many.
	I want to issue a public apology to the hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Mr. Wright). Last week we had the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Lord Mandelson, before us. The hon. Member for Great Yarmouth had questions that he wanted to ask, but even with only 10 of the 11 members of my Committee present, it was not possible to include him within the timing. I plead guilty to some mismanagement of the time, but in a Committee of 11 it is a challenge to allow all Members to have a valuable role to play in the work of the Committee. A Committee of 14 is just too big.
	To be honest, I would prefer to see Select Committees made up of nine members. They would have a proper collegiateness and a sense of shared responsibility. The problems of maintaining a quorum—which, if we are honest, we must acknowledge often concern Select Committee Chairmen—would be much less with smaller Select Committees whose members would feel that they owned the Committee much more effectively. I have seen no case for a Committee of 14. A Committee of that size was a real problem to me as Chairman, in ensuring the full engagement of members of the Committee. That matters a great deal.
	There is also the problem, which has been mentioned, with the increasing number of Committees. The House is casually adding yet another Committee to its total number of Committees. That has implications for two different parts of the House's work. First, Members are all under huge pressure and are often required to be in three places at the same time, sometimes four: we have Select Committees, General Committees, Westminster Hall, the Chamber of the House, meetings with constituents, and who knows what else. There are not enough Members in the House to put on the increasing number of Select Committees.
	We will have that debate at greater length when the subject of the regional Select Committees comes before the House, perhaps in a couple of weeks' time. I believe that the Government are fundamentally misguided in believing that those Committees can work effectively. We do not have the time, as Members, to do that work, unless we reduce the size of existing Committees. I believe that that is a real problem.
	There is also a problem for the resources of the House. Every time a new Select Committee is established, it means more public expenditure: more Clerks and more people to ensure that the Committees can work effectively. Huge expense is involved in the motion before the House, but it could easily have been avoided had we decided simply to replace the Environmental Audit Committee with the Energy and Climate Change Committee.
	I move now to the substance of my own amendment—the question of timing. I am grateful to the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) for what he said from the Liberal Democrat Front Bench, and I agree that there is a need for a Select Committee to cover the Department of Energy and Climate Change. When the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform came before my Committee last week, I urged its rapid establishment, on the assumption that it would replace the Environmental Audit Committee. I was genuinely very surprised and disappointed to discover that that was not the case.
	We all have work programmes. I was very grateful to the Deputy Leader of the House for what he said from the Dispatch Box about my Committee's report "Energy prices, fuel poverty and Ofgem", but we had sittings planned to finish it off. Ofgem has published its initial probe and findings, and we had sittings planned with energy Ministers and Ofgem to wrap up the inquiry. It would be nice to be able to do that without fearing that we were treading on the toes of a new Committee.
	I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Member for Fylde has similar issues with his Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, and my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk will soon be able to speak for himself. However, given the Government's rather surprising decision—over which I feel slightly bounced—it would be helpful to have a couple of months to finalise our work programmes. That is all that we are asking for, and it will ensure that the new Committee, when it is up and running, can do so without treading too aggressively on the toes of the other Committees.
	We also need time to sort out the staffing behind the scenes of the new Committee. We have a very talented Committee specialist, Rob Cope, who was responsible in large part for writing the report to which I have referred, and I imagine that he will want to go to the Energy and Climate Change Committee. Who else will be provided to support his work with the new Committee? What new Clerks will be discovered? What will be the consequences for the work of existing Committees? Which staff will we lose? It is all a bit rushed, but it need not have been if the Government had simply replaced the Environmental Audit Committee with the new Committee.
	I believe that there is a very strong case for giving us just a couple of months so that we can manage the Committee's existing work programmes and staff in an orderly fashion. I strongly support the principle of what the Government are doing: I have no problem with that, save for my belief that it would be better to replace the existing Committee rather than create an additional one. The principle behind having a new, separate Department is good, and this House must be able to subject it to effective scrutiny. I believe that that would be best served by having a smaller Committee of 11 members that can meet the legitimate needs of the nationalist parties. I think that that arrangement would allow more effective scrutiny by this House of the Committee's work.

Tony Wright: I have no doubt that the new Department will be distinguished, or that the Minister leading it will do so in a distinguished way. The House's Select Committee system has to respond when a new Department is established, and the tradition is that a Department is matched by an appropriate departmental Select Committee, so the logic is clear.
	In some ways, the challenge is for the Select Committee system, which is perhaps the most conservative part of this institution. I speak as one who chairs a Select Committee, and it is natural for us to want to defend our territory. We are not always very imaginative in thinking about how the system might work differently.
	In a sense, the Government can be commended for thinking more thematically and sensibly about producing a departmental change to reflect a changing aspect of Government, but the consequence is that the House must think about how it can match that in an intelligent way. It may not be the most intelligent response simply to set up yet another Select Committee, because, as we have heard, many Committees already operate in those areas. We need a more sensible response to match the new Department, beyond inventing a new Committee simply because there is a new Department—but, as I say, that is a challenge more for the House than for the Government.
	I want to say two other things briefly, although they may be less helpful in terms of what is being proposed. The first takes up a point made by the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes), and it reflects an argument—or at least a conversation—that my Committee has been having with the Government for quite some time about how machinery of Government changes should be handled. Indeed, we had my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, in his previous incarnation, before us on this matter not so very long ago.
	It seemed very odd to my Committee that when dealing with other public bodies or bits of Government apart from ourselves, we insist on all sorts of consultative processes before substantial reorganisations take place. There is a good reason for that: we want to know the logic behind, and the case for, the reorganisation, and we want to evaluate the costs and benefits. There are always costs, although there may well be benefits, too. We want to do that in a calm, measured way, so that the sort of considerations that are being raised now, at the 11th hour, can be raised over a decent period. Of course, we learn things through that process; we learn whether we have got the reorganisation right.
	Until we took an interest in such matters, the Government did not even issue a piece of paper describing such major changes. Now we do get a piece of paper, but nothing more than that. Parliament ought to be involved. Of course the Government will decide on such changes, but Parliament should at least be consulted on major changes to the machinery of government, just as we would expect to be consulted if other bits of the public sector were to be reorganised.
	When my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change and I had an exchange on the subject, he told me that that would be highly unconstitutional, but I do not think that he really believed that, although he had been advised to say it. I have learned over the years that when things are said to be constitutionally impossible, they may on the very next day turn out to be constitutionally necessary. Parliament has to return to the issue. It would be in the interests of the Government and Parliament to ensure that the process of making large-scale changes to how the Government operate is slightly more reflective.
	When we set up new Committees, as we are doing today, we have to be mindful of what it means for Parliament and the Select Committee system. When my hon. Friend the Deputy Leader of the House opened the debate, he rightly talked about the gains that have resulted from the Select Committee system in its modern form, and the general support for it. All that is true, but it depends for its vitality on the relationship between the House of Commons and the Executive. We have to be able to operate a vital Select Committee system that scrutinises what the Executive do. If the balance between the Executive and the Commons changes materially, the ability to provide that scrutiny effectively is diminished. What I am really saying is that it is easy to set up a new Select Committee system, but less easy to make sure that it becomes part of an effective system of scrutiny, because that requires the institution itself to be effective. I put the case in that way because I have a certain worry.
	The Executive grows; there are now many more Parliamentary Private Secretaries. There is the issue of whether such people can sit on Select Committees. The idea would have been abhorrent at one time, because it confuses the scrutiny role with the executive role, but the problem reflects the fact that we will have some difficulty making the system work unless we compromise in such areas. There is also the new invention of unpaid Ministers—my hon. Friend the Deputy Leader of the House is one of them—and the new invention of assistant Ministers. In many respects, there is now an expanding unofficial Executive. The effect is necessarily to deplete the resources available for the scrutiny work of the House of Commons. We have to be clear about whether that is what we want when we set up a new Committee.
	I am told that new regional Select Committees are to be introduced. With my understanding of how the Select Committee system works, I simply do not know how all that will be possible. The Department of Energy and Climate Change seems to be splendidly conceived and led, but it needs to be matched by scrutiny by the House of Commons. I hope that that will come about not simply through invention, but through imaginative re-ordering; that is the challenge for the Commons. I simply flag up the fact that if we are not careful, the balance between Parliament and the Executive will change in a way that diminishes the ability of the House of Commons to perform the role that my hon. Friend the Deputy Leader of the House described when he opened the debate.

Tim Yeo: I rise to speak to amendment (a) in my name, but as there seems to be a larger than usual number of hon. Members in the House at 10.54 pm, I wish to make it clear to any who are not here for the purpose of speaking that I have no intention of pressing my amendment to a vote. I am happy to give that guidance. Members who venture outside will apparently encounter snow, which is proof that we are talking not about global warming, but about climate change.
	I warmly welcome the establishment of the new Department and I congratulate the Secretary of State on his appointment. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Peter Luff), I am grateful to him for remaining to listen to the debate. The shadow Secretary of State is also in his place.
	I understand the logic of responding to the creation of a new Department by the establishment of a new Select Committee. That preserves the symmetry with which the House scrutinises departmental work, but the pragmatic response might have been, and there were suggestions that this could have been done, with only 19 months to go before a general election, to ask the Environmental Audit Committee to take on the role of scrutinising the new Department.
	However, the Government have decided differently and I wish the new Select Committee well. Once it is up and running, I and my colleagues on the Environmental Audit Committee will, I am sure, co-operate happily with the Chairman and its members when they have been chosen. We have plenty of experience of working with other Committees in our present function, and I pay particular tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire and my right hon. Friend the Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack), with whom I have worked particularly closely in the past three years.
	I shall make three brief points. The first is to emphasise what the Minister said in his remarks and the intervention from my colleague, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, North (Joan Walley). I was going to call her my hon. Friend, as we seem to work so closely together. Climate change issues are, by their nature, cross-cutting issues. Tackling climate change involves tax policy, transport policy, business policy, energy policy—a range of policies. For that reason, the Environmental Audit Committee, with its cross-departmental role, is especially well placed and equipped to consider climate change issues. I am grateful for the tribute that the Deputy Leader of the House paid to the work that my Committee has done over the years. I am well served by members from all sides on the Committee who have considerable expertise.
	On certain aspects of climate change, it is clearly true that we are better able to exercise a scrutiny function than a Committee that is confined to a single Department. It was a Labour Government commitment that led to the establishment of the EAC in 1997. Its cross-departmental role is enshrined in Standing Order 152A. The logical interpretation of that role at the start of this Parliament, before I became the Chairman, was to focus on climate change and related issues as the main theme for the current Parliament, and that has been reflected in the expertise of the members, the Clerk and the staff of the Committee.
	My second point is that we already have, as a Committee, like any Select Committee, a forward programme of work in hand and already announced, for which the National Audit Office, to which I also pay tribute, has done preparatory work. There is often quite a long lead time—six or nine months or even a year—when the NAO will undertake research at our request, do that study, deliver it to us and publish it before we commence our inquiry. We do not want to be suddenly blown off course in our work because a new Committee has been established.
	We already have an inquiry under way into shipping, which will be followed by one on forestry. We will conduct our annual examination of the pre-Budget report and we are committed to an inquiry next year into emissions trading at a time when, I hope, the United States will have a system coming on to the statute book. We want to revisit the work that we did last year on the EU emissions trading scheme. Those are all inquiries that we intend to press on with and they will involve taking evidence from Treasury Ministers, Transport Ministers and Ministers in the Department for International Development and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, as well as the Secretary of State for the new Department, I hope.
	My third point is a practical concern and reflects the amendment moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire, who is right. Haste in setting up the new Committee will not serve its purposes well and will not help the establishment of a co-operative relationship with other Committees. It would be prudent to wait until the start of a new calendar year.
	My own amendment addresses my concern about the size of Select Committees, a point already well covered by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire. I shall not repeat his arguments, but I should say that it is easier to chair a Committee of 11 rather than 16, which is the number of members that my Committee has; it is also easier for members of smaller Committees to make satisfying contributions. I think that the Committee of Selection will struggle at this stage of the Parliament to find 14 keen Members eager to take on the work of a new Select Committee; it will struggle even to find 11 of them. I have no doubt that the Committee of Selection will put forward 11 names, but how regularly some of those Members will attend remains to be seen.
	Some months ago, I approached the Leader of the House with a request to reduce the size of the Environmental Audit Committee from 16 to 11. My approach was rebuffed, but I shall be happy to revisit the issue if I am given any encouragement to do so. There are 11 very active members of my Committee and several passengers who would be relieved if they were no longer required to carry out the duties of a Select Committee member.
	Let me conclude by simply saying that the Environmental Audit Committee has played a valuable role since its establishment 11 years ago. I believe that it can continue to do so, even with another Committee alongside it that scrutinises the work of the Department of Energy and Climate Change. The members of my Committee feel strongly that they would like to continue doing our work. I am confident that if we are given the opportunity, we will work constructively and positively in co-operation with the members of the new Committee, although it would be easier to do so if the Government accepted the two amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire and me.

Mark Durkan: The hon. Member for South Suffolk (Mr. Yeo) said that he would not press amendment (a) to a Division, and I have taken some consolation from that. However, given that a number of arguments have been made, it is important that I should deal with a few points.
	I do not speak with experience of being a member of a Select Committee and there are many Members in the same position who would be interested in serving on a number of Select Committees. When a new Department is created, it is right that the House should move reasonably quickly to set up a Select Committee to scrutinise its work—and, at that formative stage, to assist it in its thinking about policy development and its relations within Government and with Parliament at large. A Select Committee formed early has a better chance of having a formative impact on the Department than one formed some time into next year, say, simply for the convenience of existing Select Committees.
	An argument has been made about the possible overlap between the Environmental Audit Committee and the new Committee, but as the hon. Member for South Suffolk said, the Environmental Audit Committee's work ranges across many Committees, as any audit committee does. Its work ranges across a wide range of Departments and will often intersect with the interests of other Committees. That is why we need a good, sensible parliamentary highway code to make sure that those intersections do not result in serious clashes, accidents or undue stand-offs as to who goes where.
	Perhaps we can deal with some of the arguments raised by hon. Members against the motion in the name of the Leader of the House by revisiting the number of members of the Environmental Audit Committee, especially given the existence of the new Committee. There is a case for reducing the size of the Environmental Audit Committee and a number of its members might want to switch to the new Committee, given their experience.
	An argument has been made that we should wait until the new year because of the work of existing Committees. Perhaps those Committees should be allowed to continue some of their work and then hand it over in a better, more complete and more definitive state to the new Committee, which might be in a better position to receive it, having been on its own learning curve vis-à-vis the new Department and the new Ministers.
	This does not need to be a debate about the Department in principle; all parties have expressed a positive view. The Committee should be formed sooner rather than later given the importance of the issues that the new Department is dealing with—the complex and moving issue of fuel poverty at a time of economic challenge, and the serious matter of initiating energy strategy on energy generation for the future, particularly in the context of environmental requirements on climate change and the various international obligations, including the new targets and treaties being negotiated at the end of next year. However, arrangements can surely be made to continue with the good work of other Committees without creating serious difficulties or disruption.
	Several Members, including the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Peter Luff) and the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright), observed that it is hard for Committees that have been doing good work on a particular issue and have developed it to a particular stage suddenly to lose it because of a change in Government. The same thing happens to Ministers and to Departments—that is the way of Government, and Parliament needs to respond. Whatever issues we might have about how the machinery of government is changed, Parliament needs to be flexible and adept in responding in a practical and straightforward way. If each time a new Department is created there is confusion about whether we have a Select Committee and we then end up with different breeds of Department, some of which have Committees and some of which do not—

Peter Luff: It is a bit different for Parliament than for Departments. When a new Department is set up, the civil servants simply transfer to it. For Parliament, rather different issues are involved in terms of the staffing of Committees. It is much more complex for us, with our smaller and more limited resources, to respond in that flexible way, and much easier for Departments.

Mark Durkan: I take the hon. Gentleman's point. However, that is one of the reasons I suggested that if we go ahead and set up this Committee, the existing Committees—not only their members but their expert personnel—can continue to do their good work. That might allow time for parliamentary channels to review what the new Committee needs in the way of support personnel as it begins its work. Setting up the new Committee need not necessarily bring to an abrupt end the existing work of other Committees. That can continue into the new year and sensible handovers can then take place. Surely we can be practical and realistic about that.
	This Department has been formed in a new context and is working on several significant challenges right across the policy range—social policy on fuel poverty and economic and enterprise policy in relation to the significance of energy policy to business and to the broader economy. There are also international and diplomatic dimensions to the quest for international standards in respect of environmental regulation and climate change. The new Department has a big task, and it may do no harm to make the Committee a bit bigger rather than a bit smaller. That would allow for a broader spread across the parties and, as suggested by the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes), for a broader geographic spread. Whether parties are big or small, the issues under discussion present different challenges in different regions. We have to take account not only of the interests of all the various Whitehall Departments but the many and varied Departments at a devolved level, as well as local government interests throughout the UK.
	At this stage of the Parliament, it would perhaps be more appropriate to form a Committee of 14 rather than 11. If people say that that would involve an over-commitment of Members to Committees, then there might be a case for looking at the size of the Committee but not its role. It has been set up with a very distinct purpose that should range across environmental practices and targets in relation to all Government responsibilities and Departments. That needs to be respected and protected in the context of this debate and beyond it.

Angus Robertson: I am delighted to follow the leader of the Social Democratic and Labour party, who made a very convincing case about the impact of amendment (a), which would reduce the size of this important Committee from 14 to 11. I am pleased that it is unlikely to be pressed to a vote, but for the record it would be helpful to make a number of points that have not been made so far.
	At the outset, I have to say that I have no doubt that in tabling their amendments the hon. Members for Mid-Worcestershire (Peter Luff) and for South Suffolk (Mr. Yeo) did not intend to exclude parties from Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales but, as I will outline, that would be the direct consequence of automatically reducing the number from 14 to 11, and I shall explain why in a moment.
	The Deputy Leader of the House was right to remind us all of the "integral and vital part"—to use his words—that these Committees play. They oversee expenditure, the work of Departments and, in the case of energy and climate change, matters of supreme importance. The leader of the SDLP raised the point for the first time in this debate that many of the matters considered are devolved. There is shared sovereignty between Administrations in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, and the Ministers who hold portfolio responsibilities for this issue are not from UK-wide parties. In the case of the Welsh Assembly Government, colleagues from Plaid Cymru have responsibility for it; in the Scottish Government, colleagues from the SNP have that responsibility; and in Northern Ireland, a number of colleagues have it, not least the hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) who has the environmental responsibility in the Northern Ireland Assembly Government. If a Committee is going to look regularly at areas of policy where there is shared sovereignty, would it not make sense to ensure that there was permanent representation on the Committee that could feed that experience into the deliberations?
	I turn now to the issue of guaranteed places. The hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire rightly praised the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Angus (Mr. Weir) to the Committee on which he sits, but the hon. Gentleman will be aware that that place is not guaranteed. The minority parties do not have guaranteed places on departmental Select Committees because they have a membership of 11; the formula that is used sometimes may—just may—afford minority party Members or independents a place on those Committees. It is worth reminding the House that there is not a single Member of parties from Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland on the Committees for Children, Schools and Families, Communities and Local Government, Defence, Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Home Affairs, International Development, Justice, Treasury or Work and Pensions. I wish to see that changed, but that is not a matter for discussion this evening.
	We have a proposal before us, which I hope will not be pressed and which I hope the Government will not accept, that the Committee should have only 11 members. The result would then be down to the good will of the usual channels. No doubt colleagues who are part of the usual channels would work hard to include the views of Members of all parties, but I am sure that they would concede in private, if not in public, that as the arrangements currently stand, there is no guarantee of minority party representation on Committees with a membership of 11. For that reason, I am pleased that we have colleagues from Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales in high attendance, because we wish colleagues from the UK-wide parties to be aware how strongly we feel about the matter. The House authorities will not find it difficult to find volunteers from our parties to serve on the Committee. Hopefully, the UK-wide parties can do likewise when it sits as a Committee of 14, should the Government's sensible proposal proceed.

David Chaytor: The representatives of the smaller parties have made several valid points and I support the comments that the Chairmen of the two Select Committees made. I especially want to reiterate the argument presented by the Chairman of the Environmental Audit Committee, of which I am a member.
	In his opening remarks, the Deputy Leader of the House recognised the Environmental Audit Committee's contribution to the scrutiny of climate change in recent years. Indeed, in the current Parliament, we have made it the main focus of our activities. It is generally agreed that the overwhelming majority of Select Committee reports about climate change that the House has produced in recent years came from the Environmental Audit Committee. The Committee has not only a track record but a forward programme of inquiries on the theme of climate change. I therefore believe that there is a strong case for deferring the new arrangements and granting some time to assess how the proposal will work.
	The debate has another dimension, which has not yet been mentioned. We have at best an anomaly and at worst a conflict of interest between the role of the Environmental Audit Committee and that of the new Energy and Climate Change Committee. We have so far examined the problem from the perspective of the Environmental Audit Committee's cross-departmental scrutiny role, but I want to examine the problem from a different perspective.
	The new Department will have a new, cross-departmental role, which the Department that has been subsumed did not perform. That is precisely because of the Climate Change Bill, which we passed this evening. The work of the Department of Energy and Climate Change will be cross-departmental in a way that we have not previously experienced. Its impact and reach will affect the Treasury, the Department for Transport, the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. I therefore believe that there will be an extra complication because the new departmental Select Committee will, if it tracks and scrutinises the work of its Department, take on a cross-departmental role, which will bring it into conflict with the work of the Environmental Audit Committee.

Joan Walley: The Government must pay attention to the need for the new Department to be cross-cutting, if it is truly to take on board all the issues to do with climate change. That should be reflected in not only the make-up of the Department but the scrutiny that Parliament gives it.

David Chaytor: I am grateful for those comments. The conclusion that I draw from the anomaly is that, while the fact that existing Select Committees have a forward programme of work in place supports the case for making no change until 1 January, we also need to review the terms of reference of all the affected Select Committees. The Deputy Leader of the House said that he wanted to review the arrangements. I hope that he will accept that, before any change is made, we need a thorough review of the terms of reference of each of the Committees that will be affected.

Michael Jack: The hon. Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) made excellent and perceptive comments, and touched on some of the central issues of the debate. I am delighted that the Secretary of State for the new Department of Energy and Climate Change is back in his place because the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee recommended on several occasions that a Cabinet Minister should have more focus on a portfolio that dealt with climate change. It is so important and, by definition, cuts across Government. Intriguingly, in providing that additional focus, the Government have married with it the other side of the equation—namely, that part of Government activity that deals with the emission of carbon dioxide. My hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (Mr. Yeo) made a point about his Committee being transmuted into the new Committee. Marrying energy and climate change under one departmental roof means that he could bring with him the critical faculty of a Committee that dealt with emissions and also take on a critical appraisal of issues connected with generating energy. I thought that that was a good way of counterbalancing the sometimes irreconcilable sides of the Secretary of State's new Department, which concern generating energy on the one hand and seeking to reduce CO2 on the other.
	Part A of the motion before the House invites us to amend the resolution of the House of 13 July 2005 dealing with the Liaison Committee. The hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright), in his as always helpful interventions on the process of government, raised the fact that the Leader and Deputy Leader of the House had effectively ridden roughshod over a mechanism of the House designed to deal with the types of issue that we have been discussing.
	We are talking, first, about what the right composition of a Select Committee to shadow the new Department should be. I support that, but my hon. Friends have asked questions about the new Committee's composition by number, its starting date, existing workflows, the cross-cutting nature of its work and the avoidance of conflict when dealing with environmental issues. Would it not have been a good idea if, once the new Department had been formed, the Leader of the House had sought the view of the Liaison Committee, so that it could carry out, as it were, a review of how environmental scrutiny was conducted, so as to resolve any conflict and to present a solution that would have given best effect to the House's wishes to scrutinise the new Department? However, that option has been ignored and the only option is the one before the House this evening.
	As a result, a lot of good work, including the inquiry that my Committee, the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, was going to undertake into fuel poverty, will have to be postponed. Our Committee discussed the matter and wrote to the Leader of the House. I am sorry that the Deputy Leader of the House, who appears to be unaware of the debate going on around him, was also unaware of the letter that our Committee wrote in support of the view that the Environmental Audit Committee should take on the responsibility of monitoring the new Department, using its existing expertise, without necessarily creating a brand new Select Committee at this stage in the Parliament, for all the reasons that other right hon. and hon. Members have mentioned.
	It would be nice if the Deputy Leader of the House, in the conciliatory mode in which he introduced the debate, were to stand at the Dispatch Box and say that he had listened to what had been said and that the Government would not press the matter this evening, but would take it to the Liaison Committee for a proper discussion, so that all the issues could be resolved. We could thereby move forward in a spirit of harmony and excellence of scrutiny, and on the basis of proper discussion, not the imposition of the solution before the House this evening.

John Gummer: The Deputy Leader of the House was mistaken in suggesting that I was leading him into a trap by trying to discuss the issue. I was in fact making a perfectly helpful comment, which I hope he listened to carefully.
	We are tonight changing our ability to handle the difficult, long-term and extremely pressing issues of climate change. Far from denigrating the new Department and its Secretary of State, I am an enthusiastic supporter of the structure. However, as the hon. Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) said, the new Department will, by its very nature, have to have its fingers in all sorts of different pies. Indeed, the new Select Committee on climate change will, by its various decisions, recommendations and advice, help the Secretary of State to do just that. He will therefore be rather different from other Secretaries of State.
	I was merely suggesting that a number of unfinished discussions still need to take place before setting up such a Select Committee to deal with the situation, some of which have admirably been mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack), but there are others, too. For example, many of us would have liked the opportunity to discuss issues such as the fact that adaptation to climate change is dealt with by a Department other than this new Department, and that any Select Committee dealing with the new Department might want to talk about those issues.
	There are many concerns about how all this has been put together. I do not mind that too much, as long as it works. I am suggesting that this is the one opportunity that the House will have to signal to the Government how much we support the new Ministry, but how difficult we perceive its new role to be and how widespread will be the responsibility of the Secretary of State. If we are not careful, we shall have a situation in which the  Daily Mail runs a story every day about how the Secretary of State has disagreed with some other Secretary of State, because that is the almost inevitable result of the role that he will have to play. I personally do not want him to be in that position, because I want him to win these very important battles.
	Will the Deputy Leader of the House take seriously my suggestion that this is rather more complicated than just setting up a Select Committee in this way? It would serve the needs of the House a great deal better if he felt able to say, "We will not press this matter tonight. We will talk to the Liaison Committee, and we will talk more widely than that, too." I wonder whether we need to rethink how the Committee structure might be made to suit and to sort this rather special Department. That is partly as a result of the Government's innovative decision—supported by a huge majority in the House—to set up a Climate Change Committee, whose effect on the House will be different from that of any other Committee that we have set up before.
	The Government have an opportunity to be very imaginative on this matter. It is not that we do not want proper scrutiny of the new Department, but that we want that scrutiny to be carried out in a way that ensures we can help the Secretary of State to do a very tricky job. Perhaps it might therefore be better to think about this for a little longer, and to talk a little more widely before coming to a conclusion. Most of us believe that setting up the Committee before January would be difficult, given that a number of other Committees have not yet completed their work. May I request that the Minister take account of the fact that this is a special occasion, and suggest that he might not wish to rush into it in the way that he appears to have done so far?

Hywel Williams: I, too, am disappointed and a little surprised at the amendment proposing that the number of Members on the Committee should be reduced from 14 to 11. Given the universal welcome for the setting up of the new Department, and the near unanimity that we have heard tonight, the proposal strikes the wrong note. Its effect would assuredly be to squeeze out representation of the so-called minor parties on these Benches. I say "minor", but—as has already been said in Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh—we are parties of Governments.
	Devolution is, in my opinion, an imperfect solution to the problems that face us, but we are where we are, and there is a relationship between Cardiff, Edinburgh, London and Belfast. In respect of Wales, my colleagues Ieuan Wyn Jones and Elin Jones are, respectively, the Ministers for industry and for environmental and rural affairs. They have a vital interest in seeing members of their own parties and colleagues from other parties taking part in the scrutiny of the work of the new Department. That goes without saying. If there is any difficulty in filling the seats on the new Committee, in achieving a quorum or in persuading members of the larger parties to take an interest, I can assure the House that there are plenty of people on these Benches who would be happy to take up any empty seats. That is a non-problem.
	The hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Peter Luff) raised a substantial question. If I understood his intent rightly, he was referring not only to the Energy and Climate Change Committee but to the Select Committee system in general, as he believes that such Committees are too large. Having a debate at this time of night without discussion through the usual channels and within parties is not, I believe, the right way to do it. I am happy that the hon. Gentleman brought the issue up, but I am sure that there are many other ways of dealing with it in a rather more considered manner.

Peter Luff: I wish I could agree with the hon. Gentleman. I am sure that, with good will, it would be possible to agree a system of smaller Select Committees that gave proper representation to minorities. That is a very desirable objective, but I have to say that I have detected no great willingness to secure it. I believe that we should work towards it, because smaller Select Committees work and they scrutinise more effectively. Let me ask the hon. Gentleman what is better—a bigger Committee that does not work or a smaller Committee that does?

Hywel Williams: All I can say is that if Members on these Benches were engaged in the work of this Committee, we would be wholeheartedly engaged in it. As far as we are concerned, we would make it work, although the hon. Gentleman can speak for his own party.

Simon Hughes: For our part, I am keen that we do not lose sight of this issue. The Modernisation Committee, on which the Deputy Leader of the House sits, could look into reducing the size of Committees generally, while ensuring that they are properly representative so that people are not overly stretched in a way that does a disservice to the subject.

Hywel Williams: Perhaps we should leave it there and have a proper debate on the issue at some later stage.
	I finish with one further point. Reference has been made to the Liaison Committee looking further into the issue. Let me make the general point again that the minority parties would not be represented—in my opinion, quite wrongly—on this departmental Committee.

Chris Bryant: With the leave of the House, I will respond. Three key points were exemplified in this evening's debate. The first was whether there should be a stand-alone Select Committee to scrutinise the new Department or whether it should be an additional responsibility of the Environmental Audit Committee; the second was whether the new Committee should start immediately or in January; and the third was how many members it should comprise—14 or 11.
	On the first point, I firmly believe that there should be a stand-alone Committee. If the Government had not come forward fairly swiftly with the recommendation to set up such a Committee, people would quickly have started calling for us to do so. I admit that hon. Members have made valid points in the debate, but I believe that, on balance, this is the right way for us to proceed. The Environmental Audit Committee is very similar to the Public Accounts Committee, in that it has a Minister sitting on it, it was deliberately set up in the same way and it has a cross-cutting responsibility. The Treasury Committee could very well say, "But you cover many of the areas that we cover, and we would like to have a cross-cutting responsibility and do away with the PAC." That, however, would be inappropriate. We know how those two Committees work together and I think that it will be possible for the departmental Committee and the Environmental Audit Committee to work together effectively.
	The hon. Member for South Suffolk (Mr. Yeo) raised an important point about the necessity of maintaining the cross-cutting responsibility. He mentioned reports that his Committee is already planning on shipping and forestry, which obviously do not fall directly to the Department. I believe that there will be a continuing role for the Environmental Audit Committee. I know that the hon. Gentleman and the Leader of the House have corresponded on the size of the Committee—an issue that we should perhaps look at again.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) said that there would be a conflict of interest between these two Committees, but I do not believe that. Committees should be able to work co-operatively and I very much hope that the Chairs of the two Committees would want to do so.
	I note that the right hon. Members for Fylde (Mr. Jack) and for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) requested that I decline to move forward with the proposals this evening and refer them instead to the Liaison Committee. It has been an established principle in the House that whenever the machinery of government changes and a new Department is created, we should have a new departmental Select Committee, and I believe that we should abide by that.
	On whether the Committee should start immediately or in January, my hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) emphasised the need for swiftness, and I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State would want to be scrutinised by the new Committee as swiftly as possible—hence his presence throughout this evening's debate.
	The hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Peter Luff) made an important point about the work that his Committee is already doing, particularly in regard to fuel poverty. Incidentally, I am sorry if he felt that he had not been properly consulted. I had no idea that there had been any conversation about the issue. If at any future stage he, or for that matter any other Select Committee Chairman, wishes to discuss these matters, they are welcome to come and find me during a Division or at some other time. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury, North made another important point—about the forward programme for the Environmental Audit Committee.
	I think that there has been a pretty overwhelming suggestion this evening that we should launch the new Committee in January, and I am more than happy to accept the amendment to that effect.
	That leaves us with the final question of whether the Committee should have 14 or 11 members. My instinctive feeling has always been that all voices in the House should be heard in Select Committees, mainly because I believe that Select Committees do their work in a different way from the rest of the House: a somewhat less partisan way, which nearly always makes for unanimity in reports and which can mean that the House is far more effective both in its scrutiny of Government and in the face that it presents to the community outside. That is why, on the whole, I should prefer a larger Committee, and for it to be possible for smaller parties to be represented on smaller Committees.
	The hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson) made one unfortunate slip. He kept saying that parties from Scotland and Wales were not represented. I am a Welsh Member of Parliament, and I was a member of a Select Committee. I just did not happen to represent a Welsh nationalist party.
	I took account of what the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire said about Committees of 11. It is possible for Committees of 11 to include two members from the minority parties. Sometimes that is by virtue of the generosity of the governing party, but sometimes it is by virtue of the generosity of the Opposition. However, we should be considering as a whole how we can ensure better representation.
	I did not think that I would say this very often, but the hon. Member for Moray made one very good point in commending the Government's sensible proposal. I do not think I have ever heard those words from his mouth before.

Nigel Dodds: My colleagues and I welcome what the Deputy Leader of the House said about the importance of minority party representation on Committees, whether large or small. Can we be assured that he will follow that up, and that we will not be left with fine words but will see action? How does he propose to proceed?

Chris Bryant: I have been listening to the debate tonight, so pressing me to produce an action plan now is going a little far, but this is something that I think we need to address. The hon. Gentleman will be able to judge me by not just my words but my actions at a later stage.
	The hon. Member for Caernarfon (Hywel Williams) spoke of the need for minority parties to be represented on the Committee. I am minded to resist amendment (a) if it is pressed to a Division, but I very much hope that we shall be able to set up the Committee forthwith.
	 Amendment (b) agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	That the following amendments be made in respect of Standing Orders, with effect from 1st January 2009:
	A SELECT COMMITTEES RELATED TO GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS
	That Standing Order No. 152 (Select committees related to government departments) be amended in the Table in paragraph (2) by inserting, in the appropriate place, the following item:
	
		
			 Energy and Climate Change Department of Energy and Climate Change 14 
		
	
	B LIAISON COMMITTEE
	That the Resolution of the House of 13th July 2005 relating to Liaison Committee (Membership) be further amended in paragraph (2) by inserting, in the appropriate place, 'Energy and Climate Change'.
	C EUROPEAN COMMITTEES
	That Standing Order No. 119 be amended by inserting in the Table in paragraph (6), in respect of European Committee A, in the appropriate place, 'Energy and Climate Change'.

DELEGATED LEGISLATION

Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 118(6) (Delegated Legislation Committees),

Police

That the draft Police Appeals Tribunals Rules 2008, which were laid before this House on 22nd July, be approved
	That the draft Police (Performance) Regulations 2008, which were laid before this House on 22nd July, be approved.
	That the draft Police (Conduct) Regulations 2008, which were laid before this House on 7th October, be approved. —[Claire Ward.]
	 Question agreed to.
	 Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 118(6) (Delegated Legislation Committees),

Banks and Banking

That the Landsbanki Freezing Order 2008 (S.I., 2008, No 2668), dated 8th October 2008, a copy of which was laid before this House on 8th October, be approved.
	That the Landsbanki Freezing (Amendment) Order 2008 (S.I., 2008, No 2766), dated 20th October 2008, a copy of which was laid before this House on 20th October, be approved. —[Claire Ward.]
	 Question agreed to.
	 Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 118(6) (Delegated Legislation Committees),

Landfill Tax

That the Landfill Tax (Material from Contaminated Land) (Phasing out of Exemption) Order 2008 (S.I., 2008, No 2669), dated 8th October 2008, a copy of which was laid before this House on 8th October, be approved. —[Claire Ward.]
	 Question agreed to.

european documents

Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 119(9)(European Committees),

Relations Between the EU and the Overseas Countries and Territories

That this House takes note of European Union Document No. 11238 and Addendum 1, the European Commission Communication: Green Paper: Future Relations between the EU and the Overseas Countries and Territories; recalls that such Communications are consultation documents and are not legally binding; welcomes the Commission's Communication as the start of the process of the renegotiation of the Overseas Association Decision; and supports the Government's response. —[Claire Ward.]
	 Question agreed to.

SCHOOLS ADJUDICATOR

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn. —[Claire Ward.]

David Gauke: I am grateful for the opportunity to raise the issue of the schools adjudicator and partially selective schools. Let me begin by giving a little of the background. Approximately 40 secondary state schools in the country admit a proportion of pupils—between 10 and 35 per cent.—on the basis of examination results. There are two in my constituency—St. Clement Danes and Rickmansworth schools—and there are other such schools nearby that also serve pupils from my constituency, in particular Parmiter's, Watford Grammar School for Boys and Watford Grammar School for Girls, all three of which are in the constituency of the hon. Member for Watford (Claire Ward). There are also two other partially selective schools in the south Hertfordshire area: Queens' in Bushey and Dame Alice Owen's in Potters Bar. All are excellent schools that achieve ratings of "outstanding" from Ofsted and some of the best examination results of any state schools in the country, and all are heavily over-subscribed.
	That brings me to the second element of the debate: the schools adjudicator and its relationship with the school admissions code. The Education and Inspections Act 2006 had some excellent motives and was about giving schools greater freedom and independence, but there was strong opposition from Labour Back Benchers, and in particular from the Labour left. They insisted on a number of concessions, including the creation of a statutory admissions code.
	The original draft code stated that partially selective schools would not be able to give priority in their admissions policy to the siblings of existing pupils. The code argued that such a priority disadvantaged local pupils and that the practice must come to an immediate end. Schools would either have to drop sibling priority or cease to be partially selective.
	The proposal was greeted with outrage by many of the affected families. The prospect of families having to cope with different children at different schools many miles apart, the unfairness of the goalposts being moved—particularly for those families already with children at a partially selective school—and the perceived attack on popular and excellent schools provoked a strong display of opposition.
	I and a number of fellow Conservative Members met the Minister for Schools and Learners to express our concerns. However, this is a cross-party issue. Parliamentary convention prevents the hon. Member for Watford from taking part in this debate, but she expressed her strong opposition to these proposals and had several meetings with Ministers and with parents from her constituency. Given the marginal nature of the Watford constituency, her meeting with Ministers may have been more persuasive than the meeting the Minister for Schools and Learners had with my colleagues and me. As a consequence of that and of other pressures brought to bear, the Government made two concessions by changing the original draft.
	First, the Government brought in transitional rules with the intention of protecting those families already in the system so that the goalposts were not moved for them. Secondly, they did not impose a ban on sibling priority for partially selective schools within the schools admissions code; instead, they empowered the schools adjudicator to prohibit sibling priority unless the school could demonstrate that its admission arrangements as a whole did not exclude families living nearer the school.
	That issue has once again come to light because of an adjudication by the Office of the Schools Adjudicator of 24 September ruling that it was no longer permissible for the Watford grammar schools to include in their admissions criteria "cross-sibling priority". This is a unique circumstance that does not apply to the other partially selective schools. Both Watford grammar schools are single sex schools and until now it has been the policy of both to give priority to the siblings of pupils attending the other school. For example, if a boy in year 9 has a younger sister in year 6, the girl's school would give priority to the girl in year 6. There is much that I could criticise about that adjudication: the lack of opportunity for parents adversely affected to make their case to the schools adjudicator; the inconsistency with other school adjudications; the removal of effective checking of locality claims by the school, which is a separate but important issue; and the lack of importance given to the historic links between the two Watford grammar schools.
	I do not support the dropping of the cross-sibling priority and I understand that that is not the position of the hon. Member for Watford either. However, it is particularly important that the schools adjudication of 24 September will essentially come into effect in the coming school year, beginning in September 2009. That means that in the example that I gave—a boy in year 9 at the boys' grammar school and a girl in year 6—the parents would have believed that the girl would get priority at the girls' school, but that is no longer the case. That is notwithstanding the transitional rules that were included in the Government's concession on the original code.
	On that point, the adjudicator was correct at least according to the letter of the code, if not its spirit. In the transitional provision, it states that the adjudicator must not uphold an objection that would prevent sibling priority for applicants who have siblings on the school roll before the beginning of the 2008 school year. The Watford grammar schools are different schools, so they do not have the same school roll. Consequently, the protection provided in the school admissions code does not apply. However, the Government went further than the mere contents of the code.
	I mentioned a meeting involving the hon. Member for Watford, the Minister for Schools and Learners and parents from the Watford area. The notes from that meeting were produced by the office of the hon. Member for Watford and, I believe, cleared by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. They stated that the Minister for Schools and Learners had said that
	"those parents who have children in partially selective schools before the implementation of the code, i.e. before September 2008, will be protected from the removal of the rule. It would be unfair to effectively 'move the goal posts' for these parents."
	I have spoken to a number of parents who attended that meeting, and they confirm that that is their recollection of what was promised. In other words, a promise was made that would apply not just to parents at Parmiter's or those who would benefit from their children attending the same school, but to those in cross-sibling circumstances. That is not being delivered.
	I have spoken to a number of parents who are deeply upset about that development and I shall give a couple of examples that have been raised with me in the past few days by constituents. On Friday, I met a father of two children, who told me that his family used to live very close to the girls' school—close enough to be sure of place for his daughter on the ground of locality. His eldest child, his son, obtained a place at the boys' school. The family assumed that they had a place at the girls' school assured for their daughter, and in February 2007 they moved a few miles away to Croxley Green, in my constituency. They are very happy in their new home, but had they known then what they know now, they would not have jeopardised their daughter's place at the school by moving.
	Another parent told me that when her son won a place at the boys' school, they chose that school over another, co-educational school at which their daughter would have been guaranteed a place, because they understood that there would later be a place available for their daughter at the girls' school. I was informed of another case only today in which the son is at the boys' school and is feeling terribly guilty that his sisters are no longer in a strong position to obtain a place at the girls' school. This situation involves a great unfairness that goes against what Ministers had previously stated. I know that the hon. Member for Watford recognises the unfairness and is doing what she can to raise the matter. What do the Government say about it?
	The Government say that this is all about the schools adjudicator, who is independent, and that it is nothing to do with them. Parents have been told that Ministers did not expect this judgment, but the message being given is that there is nothing that the Government can do, even though they say that the goalposts should not be moved. People have made decisions about their choice of school or about moving house on the basis of these governmental promises, yet the Government are not prepared to stand by them.
	The schools adjudicator is acting on the basis of a code that was drafted by the Government. Why cannot they amend the code to bring it into line with the stated objective of protecting families already in the system? I am sure that such an approach would have cross-party support. I am sure that it would be supported by Members of Parliament whose constituencies are in the Watford area. It would solve this problem, so I urge the Minister to adopt it. She may say that the schools adjudicator is independent, but that has not prevented the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families from writing to, and putting pressure on, the schools adjudicator, insisting on the strict adherence to the school admissions code. I urge the Minister to show some flexibility on this point.
	A wider point relates to the way in which the Government are working in this area. It was clear from the original school admissions code that the Government wished to undermine the ability of partially selective schools to give priority to the siblings of existing pupils. The Government wanted to make those schools more like standard comprehensives and serve a smaller locality, and this was their way of doing it, but they found that the policy was immensely unpopular. In such circumstances, the Government could have stood their ground and argued that they were doing the right thing. Alternatively, they could have conceded the point and stopped trying to interfere in the admissions policies of those schools. Instead the Government found a third way, which involved dealing with the opposition that had built up by providing transitional provisions, albeit ineffectively, and giving the job of banning sibling priority to the supposedly independent schools adjudicator. In that way, the policy objective would be achieved but the Government would be able to distance themselves from it.
	As another schools adjudicator has said, in a separate judgment that interpreted the code,
	"the Government consider that it is generally undesirable for secondary schools which select more than 10 per cent. of their intake by ability or aptitude also to operate sibling criteria".
	I think that that is correct and that it shows what the Government wanted to do. At least the adjudicator in that case argued, again rightly, that the Government's intention was transitional provisions to protect families currently at the school. However, it is clear that the ultimate destination is that partially selective schools will no longer be able to give priority to siblings. As the school admissions code stands, it is clear that the Government's original intention of stopping sibling priority for partially selective schools will be achieved—it is only a matter of time.
	This situation was entirely predictable. I wrote an article in January 2007 stating that the Government's partial climbdown on this issue would prove to be a short-term one. I do not normally quote myself in this House, but I stated that
	"this episode provides an excellent example of how"—
	the Government—
	"hides behind unaccountable bodies which can pursue policies at variance with the views of local people. Nobody should be surprised if, in a couple of years' time, the adjudicator determines that a school may not give priority to siblings. Parents, schools, councillors and MPs will protest. And it will make no difference because, subject to judicial review, the adjudicator's decision is final."
	The future for these partially selective schools is that objections to their admissions policies will be made year after year. Eventually, a schools adjudicator will determine adversely against a school and, over time, not just cross-sibling priority for the Watford grammar schools but any sibling priority for any of the partially selective schools will be banned. We can argue over the rights and wrongs of sibling priority for those schools—I happen to believe that it is right—but the Government's approach of pursuing this objective while denying responsibility is somewhat cynical.
	For the sake of my constituents and these excellent schools, I genuinely hope that the Government will reconsider their approach, especially with regard to the transitional provisions for the Watford grammar schools and the cross-sibling issue, but let me be blunt: if the Government do not change course, it will be made abundantly clear that the responsibility for the attack on those schools, and the problems caused for many families in the Watford and surrounding areas, will lie at their feet.

Sarah McCarthy-Fry: I congratulate the hon. Member for South-West Hertfordshire (Mr. Gauke) on securing this debate, although he probably did not envisage that it would occur quite so late at night. I appreciate that he is a strong advocate of his constituents' interests, and works hard to ensure that their views are heard. I note that my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Claire Ward) is also in her place at this late hour. As a Whip, she is precluded from speaking about these issues in the House, but I know that she has had discussions and been in correspondence with Ministers in the Department for Children, Schools and Families on this issue.
	I am sure that the hon. Gentleman agrees with the importance of fair access to the school system, and the key role that the school admissions code, and associated regulations, play in achieving that. The schools adjudicators have a crucial responsibility towards the ultimate aim of fair access for all children. Their role, in the admissions context, is both to enforce the mandatory provisions of the code and to consider objections from those, including parents, who consider that the arrangements might be disadvantaging particular groups in the community. It is therefore necessary and, indeed, right that they are truly independent. As the hon. Gentleman said, their rulings are final and cannot be overturned by political whim or public pressure. In order for them to act as the enforcers of the code, which was put in place by Parliament, that is how it must be.
	To give a flavour of their work, in 2007-08, 108 objections were received by the Office of the Schools Adjudicator from parents about admission arrangements. Of these, 90 were upheld or partially upheld. Nineteen were received from schools, of which nine were fully upheld or partially upheld. There are proposals to extend the role of the schools adjudicators in the Education and Skills Bill, so that they can consider arrangements that they think may be unlawful, however they come to their attention, rather than through a specific referral. In that way, we will be able to drive out poor practice in admissions arrangements, and ensure that every school place is awarded based on lawful criteria.
	We will also place a duty on local authorities to report annually to the chief schools adjudicator on the fairness, legality and effectiveness of the admission arrangements in their area. In that way, the admissions system will be more closely monitored to ensure that it moves closer to our goal of fair access. We are also clear that we should continue improving the system to be as fair and transparent as possible.
	We acknowledge that not every parent receives their first preference of school. However, in the 2008 secondary admissions round, 82 per cent. of parents received their first preference school and 94 per cent. received their first, second or third preference. According to the 2008 survey of parents in England, conducted by GFK Social Research, 78 per cent. of parents felt that the school place their child received was ideal, rather than the best school available under the circumstances. We have recently completed a public consultation on improvements to the school admissions code, and are currently analysing responses. I am pleased to note that many parents have taken part in this consultation. Some 29 per cent. of respondents were parents, and they formed the biggest group of respondents. We will respond publicly to the consultation in due course.
	On the issue of partial selection, as the hon. Gentleman will know, the law permits any school with a specialism in one of the prescribed subjects to give priority to a maximum of 10 per cent. of pupils on the basis of their aptitude for that subject. Schools that had arrangements in place in 1997 for the selection of some of their pupils by aptitude can keep those arrangements in place, provided they do not increase the proportion of pupils selected under those arrangements. No other new forms of selection by aptitude can now be introduced. As the hon. Gentleman is also aware, we strongly oppose any new selection by academic ability. There are 164 grammar schools still in existence, for which different arrangements apply. Only a small number of schools operated a partial selection system at the start of the 1997-98 academic year. They may continue to select a proportion of their pupils on the basis of high academic ability.
	Let me turn to the sibling rule. Where there is a high proportion of selection by ability or aptitude, the number of non-selective places is limited. Where such a school also gives priority for its non-selective places to children on the basis that they have an older sibling at the school, the number of non-selective places available to other children is reduced even further. Assuming that the younger siblings of children who passed a test of ability or aptitude would also be likely to pass such a test, we believe that the use of the sibling criterion in these schools can lead to a disproportionately high number of children being admitted who would have passed the selection test. The result is that a much reduced number of non-selective places are available for children from other families who would not have passed the selection test.
	That is why the school admissions code advises partially selective schools proposing to give priority to siblings that they should ensure that their admission arrangements as a whole do not exclude other families living nearer the school. However, the code does not prevent schools from giving priority to siblings of children at the school, but simply advises of the possible effects of doing so. It is for the independent schools adjudicator to decide on receipt of an objection whether the use of the criterion is fair in the local context.
	In 2007-08, the Office of the Schools Adjudicator received 40 objections about the use of the sibling rule, of which 38 were upheld or partially upheld. Twelve were from parents with a child already in the relevant school, 18 were from parents whose children were not yet in the school and 10 were from local authorities. However, we recognised in the code that some parents would have a reasonable expectation that their younger children could attend the same school as their older child. That is why we included the transitional arrangement to which the hon. Gentleman referred, which effectively prevents the adjudicator from upholding an objection to the sibling criterion at one of those schools as long as the older child was on roll at the school before the beginning of the 2008 school year.
	Let me move on to the situation in Watford. It would not be right for me to discuss that individual case in great detail, and I do not think that it is appropriate for me to comment on the adjudicator's judgment. My understanding from what the hon. Gentleman has said and from other discussions that I have had is that parents feel aggrieved because my hon. Friend the Minister for Schools and Learners agreed at a public meeting in 2006 that parents' reasonable expectations about admission arrangements should not be changed midway through the process.
	As far as I am aware, my hon. Friend made no mention of the rather unusual arrangement for the cross-sibling rule at the meeting simply because he was not aware of it. I understand that he gave an undertaking, in all good faith, that parents who had children already at the school and therefore had a reasonable expectation that their younger children would follow should not be disadvantaged. He delivered on that commitment in the transitional arrangement to which I referred earlier.

David Gauke: Surely the point that the Minister for Schools and Learners was making was that
	"those parents who have children in partially selective schools before the implementation of the code...will be protected from the removal of the rule."
	That is the principle, and it applies to the cross-sibling situation as well as elsewhere. People did not know what the situation would be in 2008 and their perception was that their younger children would have priority, but now that has been removed.

Sarah McCarthy-Fry: My hon. Friend the Minister for Schools and Learners could not have been expected to give a commitment on a rule that he was not aware existed. As far as he was concerned, he was referring to the sibling rule, and he was not even aware that a cross-sibling rule existed.
	My understanding of the determination by the adjudicator in respect of the Watford schools is that it has not changed the position for parents who had an older child on-roll at the same school before 2008. However, it has ended the practice of giving priority to children who have an older brother or sister at the other school, and this practice was not covered by the transitional arrangement in the code. As the hon. Member for South-West Hertfordshire has stated, the Secretary of State has no powers to overturn the adjudicator's decision. That can be done only by the courts.
	However, as I said earlier, we have been consulting on improvements to the schools admission code for 2010 onwards. Following discussions with my hon. Friend the Member for Watford, I understand that, due to the determination of this case coming soon after the consultation on a revised code ended on 2 October, some parents felt that they had missed the opportunity to contribute to the consultation. Given the circumstances, I would welcome any comments that they have, and I will consider any responses from them, provided that my Department receives them by the 15 November. I hope that the hon. Member for South-West Hertfordshire will welcome that extension to the consultation.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Watford has also asked specifically that, as part of the consultation, I consider extending the transitional arrangements to cross-siblings as well as siblings from 2010 onwards. The hon. Member for South-West Hertfordshire also mentioned that in his contribution, and I can say that I will consider the matter, although I can make no commitments at this stage. In any case, of course, an extension would not apply to those parents with children who are due to enter school in September 2009.
	To conclude, I believe that the schools adjudicators play a crucial part in ensuring that the school admissions system is equitable, so that parents stand the greatest chance of receiving a place for their child at one of their preferred schools. I am sure that the hon. Member for South-West Hertfordshire will continue to support all local parents in his constituency to ensure that they have a strong voice in the debate as it continues.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Adjourned accordingly at six minutes past midnight.